Study Effective Teachers

One of the many opportunities that was laid out for me during my student teaching was the opportunity to study effective teachers. So during the last weeks of my student teaching this fall, I tried to observe at least one or two classes each day other than the ones with my cooperating teacher. I thought that it was particularly important to observe other math teachers, but I also observed other teachers in my block (Language Arts, Science, and ESL), to get a sense of how they deal with some the same students that I saw in my classroom. Both types of observations were definitely helpful for a variety of reasons.

One teacher who I particularly enjoyed watching was Mrs. Weatherholt in 7th Grade Science. She taught in such a conversational manner so that student participation felt absolutely natural. As part of their weekly reading time, they read an article about earthquakes and then wrote their own paragraph summaries. She was very quick to praise each student who volunteered to read theirs aloud. It was not false flattery; she found specific aspects about each student's writing that she was able to commend. She had such presence with her students that they seemed compelled to pay attention and participate, even some of the students who have caused behavior problems in my class and in others.

Another observation that was particularly helpful to me was Ms. Taylor's ISTEP enrichment class, which is targeted towards students who are having trouble passing the math portion of the ISTEP. I taught this same class for a few weeks and really struggled with it, in part because the curriculum felt very prescribed. It was nice to see Ms. Taylor including those same elements that I did in my class, but in what felt like a more engaging and helpful manner. For example, for our daily bellwork questions, we both used the same material, but rather than reviewing the answers simply on the overhead, she asked students to share their answers on whiteboards. Another step that she utilized to further student learning on bellwork was that for problems that students had a great deal of difficulty on, she gave them the first step and then asked them to continue working out the problem on their whiteboards. I thought that this showed a good balance between skipping over difficult problems and ceaselessly answering questions. They also followed the same format as my class for the "10 Questions;" however, she spent time reviewing the day's skill and gave them quite a few examples before they went through the actual "10 Questions." Though I felt like she was covering the material much more thoroughly than either I or my cooperating teacher had been able to do, I felt like her class period was paced appropriately and that she was not rushing through material. It was inspiring to see her using the same tools as I had to work with in the class, but her using them much more effectively.