Lauren Madison
2/24/23
1:35-3:10
1. Sequence of Events
Students came in and began working on their journals for the day. I walked around and said hi to students and helped them with their journals if they needed it until it came time for students to begin their weekly quiz. This quiz was the last one of their novel Refugee and instead of covering the last few chapters and doing multiple choice like her weekly quizzes usually are, she did three broad questions and asked for a written response. As soon as students discovered it was a written response I got a lot of negative reactions from the students around me and they all declared they were going to fail and that they didn't even want to do it. This led me to walk around the area and ask students if they needed help or not and then I'd sit with them. When the next class began a student that regularly asks me for help came up and asked me if I could please help her with her quiz.
2. Elaboration of One or Two Significant Events
The student who asked me to help her with the quiz immediately wanted me to start helping her with an essay that was due two weeks ago instead of helping her with the quiz. I tried to explain that we needed to get the quiz out of the way first and then I would help with her essay after we finished. She nodded and acted like she was going to begin her quiz, but then she turned to me and explained how she just wants to get the essay done and that she can use her journals to answer the quiz questions. I asked her why don't we work together on the quiz and use the book and figure out the answers in there instead of using the journals and then we can work on the quiz. I grabbed us each a copy of the novel and we went to work. The three questions on the quiz were good questions that required some thought and showing understanding but for the most part, if you'd never picked up the book and just skimmed through you would find the answers within a few minutes. One of the questions asked the students to describe each character's personality and whether or not the student felt the character could take on the parental role they had to in the novel. When the student was trying to answer the question she kept bringing in all of these random details from the novel that had no relevance, for instance, she'd often bring up how a character ended up in the concentration camp and tell me his entire story from his first chapter to the end of the novel but somehow in there she never answered the actual question. I'd keep having to ask her "Okay, but why is this relevant to Josef's story?" or "How does his dad being a lawyer correlate with him helping the other refugees take over the ship he's on?" and she'd just laugh and apologize. I kept trying to reassure her that it was okay and that remembering all of the details is a good thing it's just we needed to work on shortening the responses and including the actual content-based answer Ms. Bleicher is looking for. Then we'd start again and she'd start telling me about how Josef's dad was a lawyer so that's why Josef ended up on the ship. She knows all of the big details but wasn't able to connect them even when I'd find the exact answer in the novel and tell her to read through the entire page and see if she can connect any dots based on the information she reads. She'd pick up the smallest detail and say that's the answer when right below it the answer is right there.
3. Analysis of Episode
This was my first situation where the feedback I gave was ineffective and it was hard. Usually, the students are able to understand my feedback or if they aren't we just keep working until they are able to understand it. With this student, we were able to complete the quiz but it took almost the entire class and was a lot of back and forth trying to get her to understand that Ms. Bleicher is not asking us for the entire plot line for each character but rather just answer these three questions that directly relate to certain events in the novel. She kept apologizing and repeating the behavior which was hard because I feel I tried multiple approaches to help her understand the feedback but she couldn't understand it. She is extremely smart but she struggles a lot with time management and keeping up with her work. When I talked to Ms. Bleicher about it, she explained that it was kind of the norm with this particular student and that she was noticing behavior and tendencies that aligned with a possible learning disability but that the parents are not going to test for it. This made me feel like I understood the student a bit better and that maybe I can work with this student more one-on-one to find something that works for her.