Observation Example #3

Note: This is the narrative write-up for a class observation I completed for a 9^th grade history teacher. This write-up was included as an example of comprehensive feedback around a body of expected practice in the book The Self-Organizing School, (p. 217-220) written by Alan Bain (2007). This book describes the school reform process undertaken at Brewster Academy.

Jane, thank you for allowing me to visit a peer tutoring exercise. In this lesson, students were editing each other’s speeches that they had written rough drafts of. There were several strengths of this lesson, which I will list below.

• The class was quite intentional and your structure of the lesson was made it very clear what students were supposed to do. The overall plan allowed you to meet your objectives of the day, which was for each student to have received meaningful from a peer on their speech.
• The lesson was clearly tied to rubric progress and you made that clear to students at the outset.
• I noticed your concerted effort to ask students more checking for understanding questions. During a portion of an engagement measurement during your presentation on how to fill out the feedback form you provided 7 opportunities to respond during 3.25 minutes of observation intervals or roughly 2 per minute. This rate is quite good and should be a goal for you to continue to strive for.
• You employed the team’s Behavior Management Plan with consistency, good humor, and respect when students did not have their papers printed.
• You made excellent use of a proximity control technique by roving around the room, especially when you were presenting information on how to complete the feedback form.
• The overall engagement was satisfactory at 83%. All of the off task behaviors observed were during the phase when you were presenting information to students on how to use the feedback form. You were doing the right steps (proximity and asking questions) to address this. Students were completely engaged when working on the editing tasks.

I can offer a few ways to make this lesson even better than it was.

• It would have been even more effective if you could have referred to a specific visual representation of the rubrics or of portfolio products so that you could illustrate specifically what skills students would be working on with this project. This way the goals of the lesson would have been visually reinforced for the students.
• The actual feedback form that students used to evaluate their peers could have been modified to provide even better structure to how students provided feedback. The “needs improvement, average, excellent” rating scale may be easy for students to use, but I question how this will help students make changes to their papers. One way to address this would be to have something on the form that caused students to mark or list specific parts of the speech that needed to be improved upon. For example, having something that called on students to underline sentences that are not “clear and easy to understand” would have indicated to their peers what they needed to change.
• Also, you asked students to have their speech in a specific format (grabber, body, etc.), yet there was nothing on the feedback form that called on students to evaluate whether or not that format was being followed.
• Finally, this lesson did not call on the peer editors to see if their peer could employ any of the changes they recommended. It would take some additional work on the lesson, but having students see if their peer can make changes to their speech based on the feedback provided would be a nice additional step to consider. This may only be able to be done for more mechanical type errors such as sentence construction, but even that would have helped ensure that the feedback provided would have been utilized effectively.

I hope this feedback is helpful. Thanks for having me in! - Peter