Observation #2 - February 22

Today was another observation morning at Hollymead - my Teaching Teammate and I decided to venture back during our usual time slot and spend some time during the student centers and literacy bloc in the morning. We usually were there during this time slot last semester and there were so many things that had progressed and changed since we were last at the circle rug. Children really do make leaps and bounds in one single school year.

The most interesting part of the observation was getting to meet Miss K - the student teacher from Mary Baldwin College. She is very organized, very good with the students and rather comfortable in the classroom - and has basically taken over at this point. Ms. D was pretty funny in that she was having a field day relaxing and getting grading done while her student teacher had clearly taken the reins. There were so many things about Miss K that I hope to embody when I am student teaching in the coming fall - her calm attitude with the children, the way she seemed to have it all together (though I am sure underneath she was frantically trying to balance her act), and the fresh excitement that she gave everything we saw her do. I noticed that she had picked up certain habits from Ms. D in how the classroom was ran, and really tried to respect and maintain these traditions and practices, and on the other hand she was really trying to make it her own place and own environment at the same time. She was not relaxed with discipline (which is something I would be nervous to raise my voice over with the real mentor teacher in the room) and even with 5 adults in the room (Ms. D, us two Curry students, the reading specialist, and the student teacher) there was still an alarming amount of chaos and first-grade energy buzzing around. No matter how much authority is present, there still needs to be a system. At times my Teaching Teammate (TT) and I were surprised at how "in the way" we felt with this buzzing little beehive full of busy workers around us.

Other than that, we hit the gold-mine for our unit when we conferenced a little bit with Ms. D during snack time. Besides sharing our Unit plan with Miss K (who was flexible and very helpful) we got to stick our noses in Ms D's file cabinet and make copies of plenty of worksheets and activities for patriotism that she had stashed away in her "social studies file". Ms. D always reminds us that this "is my first year NOT doing kindergarten...so I just collect everything I can and keep it all, since it is so different teaching 6 year olds versus 5 year olds." She had some stuff that was a little bit too much "American History" or "Famous Americans" for us, but most of it was incredible.

The true hilight was getting to witness her pre- and post-assessment - as she was actually administering a "post-test" to a few students she would pull away from centers out in the hall (in groups of 2). She showed us exactly what the documents looked like (multiple choice,circling answers) and exactly how she gave them (reading them orally, repeating the questions and answers or pointing to words as she goes for students who need more help). I was sitting next to Student M, who was the "new girl" during October this past fall, taking the test and having quite a difficult tiem with it. She was circling things like "The name of our country is Africa" and the capital of our country is "Charlottesville" on her paper, when Ms. D got a little bit too frustrated. She stopped right in the middle of one of the questions she had repeated over and over, and just decided that Student M didn't have any idea what she was doing and that they were both wasting time during language arts. Ms. D explained to me that she was going to have to re-teach that lesson to the students who were doing similarly to what I had just witnessed with Student M, and that there were all kinds of factors that kept kids from getting right answers - home/school cultural gaps, attention and learning disabilities, and lack of connections, etc.

"Student M, what language do you speak at home? What language do you and Mommy use?" -Ms. D
"What? Thailand." - Student M
"That's what I thought...makes a big difference..huh." Ms. D

I had never thought of or even really been that close to assessment, and after having read so much about it in Popham, and talking about it over and over, it was incredible to see Student M's progress and responses, versus another student who nailed the information - as Students O and A always tend to do.

Ms. D explained to both my TT and I that she gives the same pre- and post-assessment, and that the multiple choice would be a solid way of getting at the information. Having JUST met with our professor that morning for a unit conference, it was really interesting to have so many of our questions ("What does a unit look like? How does pre-assessing go?") answered, and to have things to build upon (like having our KUD's in there - at all costs when building our pre-test) and learning from mistakes and things that Ms. D doesn't always have time for -which we are blessed to experience with this placement on our own time. There are so many factors of assessment that come up and that surface even before you give it to real students that I am anxious to see how it goes!