Last Day at LC

My last field experience day at Lawrence Central was a good one. It was nice to be able to attend a PLC meeting in the morning. The Government PLC taught me a lot about the collaboration among teachers. The three teachers gave us a log of what they had been doing each week during their PLC meetings. A lot of the work they do is through assessments and seeing where there students are at before and after tests. They showed us that they use past questions and then new questions from the next Unit on their Unit Exams in order to gauge their students. They also showed us a project all of their classes put on, by running a mock election with students of the school. The Government classes ran the mock elections and then compared the results of the elections. They looked at race, gender, socioeconomic class, and age when comparing the results. The government teacher told us that whenever you can bring these types of results to students and then have them analyze them and talk about the inconsistencies and surprises it is important to their learning. Next, the last teacher showed us how he takes somewhat boring topics like federalism and uses topics that are important to students to explain them. In this case, it was the legalization of marijuana. It was interesting to see how the teacher took what students were interested about and turned it in to an effective way to teach Government. 

During the day we were able to go and observe the common areas of the lunch room and their commons. It was interesting to see how student's interacted with each other. It was hard for me to identify the different types of kids based on the activities and interests they had. However, I did see that most every lunch table was pretty segregated. Most tables were either all african american, latino, or white students. There was one table of all asian students in the entire cafeteria. Very few lunch tables contained students of different races. It was hard for me to find what students contained athletes, students in music and art, or any other type of student group. 

In class we got to take small groups of students and review with them for their test. They had a review sheet that followed their test almost word for word and I had the test. I asked them questions and help them fill in the blanks. I tried to make sure that the students had to think about each answer before giving it to them, but it was basically teaching them the test. Are teacher acknowledged that we were teaching them the test and asked what we thought about it. Basically he said that his department struggles with this question all the time because they hear they should not do this, but at the same time they get paid based on performance. It was a hard question to answer and one that I am not sure I will be able to answer yet.

Overall I learned a lot and gained so much experience from this field experience. It was nice to get my feet wet and I look forward to more field experience next semester.