Classroom Ethnnography, part the sixth

Ms. Beale is the authority in her classes. She is the leader. Students are rarely actively off task, and rarely actively resist her instruction. Students do resist her authority passivly, by not working on the assigned work, or by working on other homework in class, but she either does not care to correct these students or does not notice. A few students show cooperative behavior by doing exactly what Ms. Beale instructs all of the time, such as taking out planners when Ms. Beale goes over the schedule for the next couple days, or taking notes on other students presentations. Most students resist these habits, and Ms. Beale does not ever demand compliance or try to correct these behaviors.

During free time, students socialize. This is universal among all of Ms. Beale's classes.

All of the students in her 4th hour class participate in group activites and discussion in at least groups of two, although some groups are more on-task then others. The students seem to be sitting near people they can relate to, if not friends, and so there is little discomfort during discussions.

During class on Monday, the students were working on a collage about In the Time of the Butterflies. Some students congregated by the large bins of magazines that Ms. Beale had set up, some worked at their desks. Two students went back and forth, giggling and teasing each other by pulling pages out of the magazine and using them as masks. A group of male students talked about the car magazine they had found. It was the most active I had ever seen the class. However, as soon as Ms. Beale spoke, everybody was immediatley silent, until she stopped.

It is hard to assign roles such as "disruptive" or "disappearing" to these students. Nobody ever disrupts Ms. Beale when she is talking, and there is little student-to-teacher or student-to-class interaction, so it would be fair to say that the entire class disappears when Ms. Beale talks, and is present again when they work. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend class when there was a graded discussion, so missed a day that required large group interaction, something that has been lacking in the days I visited.

Classroom Ethnography, Part the fifth

One classroom policy/actitity I want to examine a little more closely is the class scribe. Each day, a student is assigned the responsibilty to track what happened in class for those who were absent. What work was collected and assigned, what handouts were received, and what was actually done. Viewed as a whole, it is an interesting window into how students view the class, at least in terms of filling out the sheet on the left.

The scribe sheets are consolidated in a clipboard, so all students have access to every agenda and class day from the beginning of the trimester. Every scribe, without fail, copies the agenda that Ms. Beale writes on the board. Every scribe, without fail, lists the handouts received and the work assigned, if any. Varience only really intrudes when students "List completely and sequentially WHAT WE DID TODAY".

Some students simply recreated the Agenda in their own words, for example, on the first day, a student writes "We filled out ID cards with parents names and then we discussed class expectations and had the room tour. The scribe calendar was passed around for everybody to sign. We wrote our journals on the importance of certain values." When the agenda listed 1. ID card 2. syllabus/room tour 3. scribe 4. journal. Many students described activites by simply saying that they did them, instead of describing them, for example "Notes on run-on sentences --what it is and how to correct it."

Some students wrote little or nothing. A lot of the scribe sheets are missing, or incomplete. Ms. Beale grades the sheets occaisionally for completion, and gives the students opportunities to make up the work on another day for half credit. Still, many days are not covered, and some days are somehow covered twice, which is either a confusion in schedules, or students trying to "pull one over" on Ms. Beale.

A few students, however, took it upon themselves to write more. One student expanded the note-taking acronym SKRAWL. One student included a diagram of how to annotate and reasons why Ms. Beale uses exit slips. One student listed and defined the vocab words assigned in class.

So, the question I have to ask is: Is this a valuable task? I assume that this was originally started in order to enable absent students to have some autonomy in regard to catching up to the class, and also to save the teacher some trouble in getting the students caught up. But the perfunctary, and sometimes completely neglected, descriptions probably cause more questions than answers. Of course, those times the student goes beyond in their descriptions are extremely helpful. And there is a certain value in having students track what the class is actually doing. This can be a form of informal assessment as well, as if the student is unable to communicate what they did, then they probably didn't understand what they did.

I am going to continue to use this activity next tri, but I am going to veiw it with a critical eye. I may have to keep a constant watch on who has the Scribe responsibilty, in order to assure that it gets done. And that, in the end, will not be worth my time.

Classroom Ethnography, Part the forth

School was cancelled on Friday, as it was all over, so I had no chance to attend classes then. On Wednesday, I attended, even though I was still overcoming sickness. I didn't talk much, and ate many, many cough drops. I felt worse at the end of the day than I had at the beginning.

In class on Wednesday, Ms. Beale had the class "report out" on a small group discussion on In the Time of the Butterflies that they had done in the previous class periods. The questions were composed in order to guide students towards making inferences in the text. Ms. Beale began the activity by giving directions: speak clearly, listen, take notes on new ideas, etc.

During the activity, each group stood, in turn, faced the rest of the group, read their question they had been assigned from the handout (linked from a screenshot above), and then detailed their answer using in-text examples of events, plot recitation and citations. The other students did not comment or add any questions. Very few students wrote any notes, and one is even doing math homework instead. It is obvious to me from my observations that students did not value this activity all that highly beyond their personal performance, which Ms. Beale will grade them on.

Ms. Beale does comment on every presentation, modeling an emotional response to the text, potential themes and messages in the text, and correcting misconceptions. She often says "The really interesting part is..." or "What I noticed was...".

While students were composing the answers to this discussion on Monday, I noticed that students tended to compose their claim beforehand, and then look for evidence to support it. I noticed this with the AP students as well while they were working on a synthethis AP style question. This "inside out" method seems to be time consuming and difficult, especially when the evidence does not bear out the original conclusion.

Aside: Students, just now (I'm writing this from Ms. Beale's room), were talking about the book before Ms. Beale passed out the 3rd and final multiple choice comprehension test. One student asked the others "Are Maria Teresa and Mate the same person?" and another answered, "Yeah, it's like Trujillo and El Jefe." To which, another student responded, "Wait, they are the same person?"

Obviously, there are reader misconceptions that are happening in this text. While, on one hand, I'm glad that the students are addressing them themselves, I'm concerned that these misconceptions about these main characters aren't being fully resolved earlier. The last student confessed to me, after I had explained how "jefe" means "boss" in Spanish, that he might have compared and contrasted El Jefe and Trujillo! This could have been a joke, but since Ms. Beale's class seems to consist of a lot a worktime and little class discussion, I wonder if there are other misconceptions that are not being addressed.