Week Two

This past week I’ve learned a lot about observation and the various types of observing. We observe for many reasons in the classroom such as seeing evidence of students’ knowledge, patterns in their thinking, and helping plan our instructional lessons with their own interest in mind. See observe students’ levels of engagement, interactions, behaviors, and success so that we can reflect on our students development. There are many ways to record these observations as teachers, running records are a detailed narrative description of a sequence of behaviors rather than description of a single incident. Which would be a great way to record your observations of a student during group activities or recess. Another great method is anecdotal which are brief narrative descriptions of a single incident covering what, when, and where. This would be a great way to record an observation you saw a student do for the first time that year. Time sampling is used when there is interest in determining the frequency of a certain behavior occurrences, like how often a student gets distracted during a lesson. 

            We also developed our own rubrics this week and it was more challenging than I thought it would be. It was difficult to distinguish between what is considered a three and a two, since there must be a slight difference in the required work for a better grade. It can be hard to present it clearly to the students what exactly you except from them. In the future I would change our lowest score from labeled as ‘poor’ to something less harsh for some kids to hear. Someone left a comment about how that could come across negatively to a child and I see how that could be