Observation Example #2

Name: Linda

Date: 9/27/10

Introduction: This was a Pre-Calculus class with 12 students in it.

Class Atmosphere: The overall tone of class was quite impressive. The level of dedication, focus, and attention to the math for your first cooperative learning activity of the year was outstanding. Your interactions with students were highly appropriate and supported an atmosphere where learning is everyone’s goal.

Student Learning: Class started with you asking students to come up and turn in their homeworks (I like this routine of kids being responsible for getting homeworks to you as a routine). You told students that there is a test tomorrow, something that they already knew. Today was a STAD review and you assigned students to groups and locations based on initial instructional groupings. The transition to their groups was very quick, which is good. Once they were seated you asked if they had all their past papers, etc. Students got out their STAD review sheets.

From here you described the task structure for the activity. Students were to work together on the problems and talk through the problems with their group members. They were to use their group members as resources before asking you. I did notice, however, that you jumped in to help Meredith, before she had a chance to get help from her partners. Be careful of this when it is not needed.

Students got down to work very well. I was impressed with their motivation and level of engagement. They worked well without any external evaluation of how you would give them feedback on their behavior. You may want to consider this while students are working well so that you can reinforce this positive behavior. If you can fast forward to April when you have to keep these seniors engaged, trust me, you will want them to know clearly what you are expecting in terms of their behavior during group work and be able to give them feedback on their behavior.

I observed students doing a pretty good job of helping each other. There were several instances of really good interactions between peers. The learning power of such instances cannot be overstated. It is huge in getting students to process the info and thus advance their learning. Cooperative learning is an extremely valuable tool for doing this.

At 20 minutes into class you stopped class and focused their attention on the board to see how you would solve a problem that everyone was struggling with. You did a nice job of asking students questions as you went through the problem. You did a nice job of sensing when to show them things and when to ask them to tell you things. You were very natural at doing this. I can tell that you are doing just fine at modeling how to do things for students.

By 43 minutes in class I was observing a slight increase in off task behaviors. One group was sitting quietly and another had a few students talking about things not math related.

Class ended with you giving students a few more pointers about how to study for the test. Asking them to be active in their studying was spot on. Don’t assume that they will know how to do this, however. Taking time to show them may be worth it.

There are a few things for you to think about relative to cooperative learning. There are 4 components that we believe should be in place for cooperative learning to be effective.

1. Task structure – This defines how you want students to work through the activity. The goal here is to ensure that students are all working on and discussing the same problem at the same time. While I did not see individuals working on their own in this class, you may want to consider a more defined task structure in the future. One way to accomplish this is to insist that students work on one problem on their own first and then discuss their answers and process with the group. This ensures that students engage at a deep level and are not just doing what a peer tells them to. Differences in answers or questions can be discussed and consensus sought. Only when consensus cannot be reached would you need to intervene.
2. Interdependence - This is the hardest aspect of CL to get in place, but the most important. This is the mechanism that tries to ensure that all students actually care about how their peers perform. This can be accomplished by students being dependent on each other for some info (usually a Jigsaw) OR by building a sense that the performance of their peers impacts what happens to them. This is linked to #3 below.
3. Group Goal – This is where you build the sense of teamwork and establish how the performance of the team can earn certain recognition or rewards. There are several ways to accomplish this, which involve rewarding students for their improvement over a base score (quiz averages). I can explain this in more detail when we meet.
4. Individual Accountability – This is where students demonstrate to you that they can do the work independently. Everyone has to show you that they have the skills needed. The quiz or test accomplishes this component.

Summary:

Linda, I observed several things that demonstrate to me that you have some very natural teaching skills. You have earned student respect. You show students how to do things in a clear manner with good awareness of how students are doing with their learning. You seem to be quite confident and in control of the class situation. This is huge so keep this up. The bulk of my feedback has to do with understanding more about the principles of cooperative learning that we adhere to here. I look forward to discussing these in greater detail when we meet.

Nice job! Thanks for having me in. - Peter