Observation #3

         I observed a geometry class during the lunch period. I assumed it wasn’t going to be the best class to observe due to the fact that it was lunch block, but I was hoping that it would give me a good sense of some management skills. As the students entered the classroom, the teacher told them that they had to sit in their newly assigned seats that she assigned the previous day. About half of them listened to her. Those that did sit in their seats were given their folder with their materials and worksheets in it. There was a Do Now on the board and as they were going over the Do Now the teacher realized that one of her students had a portable Wi-Fi connector that she was using to play games on her phone. The teacher called the administration down to the room and took the girl with them as they left. The girl did not come back until later and I assumed that they took her Wi-Fi away when she came back. The students were learning about proofs of triangles and were given a handout on how to do it after walking through an example on the SMART board together as a class. Nobody was really doing the proof on the handout. Throughout the entire class one student in particular was making it extremely difficult for the teacher. He would give her attitude, talk with his neighbors instead of doing his work (which in turn made them not pay attention), and even stormed out of the classroom after claiming that the teacher “touched him” and he had to go “clean up”.

The teacher of this class was having a hard time taking control of her students and not allowing them to push her around. Throughout the entire class, she was making a detention list and continually adding to it, but it seemed to have no effect on the students. If I were to guess why this didn’t work, I would assume she does not enforce the detention list.

I believe that this teacher had poor classroom management skills. She wasn’t as consistent as she could be to her own rules and everyone in her class knew it. I felt bad for the teacher because she seemed to be a really nice person, but I believe that may have just been another reason the students knew that they could get away with that stuff. I know that this class was probably a very low preforming class and that probably had something to do with their misbehaviors. It didn’t help that the teacher didn’t take the time to try to do something other than direct instruction with them.  I think that if she allowed them to move around and do some hands on activities, the class would have preformed a lot better.

I feel bad for those students that were in the class who were trying to do their work. They were trying to understand the material and couldn’t due to all of the other students misbehaving. Those students are really affected in a negative way and they did nothing to deserve being in that class with those misbehaved students. If the teacher had better management skills, she could have eliminated a lot of the problems in the class and some learning could have actually occurred. I think in particular this teacher does the same thing every day in class and the students are bored. She needs to find some training in some different approaches to teaching as well as some classroom management skills. Overall, this class was not conductive to student learning.