Blythe Cowen
Observation #2
January 17, 2012
School: Boston Arts Academy
Class: 11 th
grade Humanities, 10:20 – 11:20am
Cooperating Practitioner: Raul Garcia
University Supervisor: Ryan Redmond
Blythe, first off, you’re doing great work.
In these notes, I’d like to focus on a few themes: student thinking, transitions, and balance.
Student Thinking
One of the topics that I wrote about in the first observation report was vision . I wrote, “As you continue to teach, you will really want to work on developing your vision of the classroom. There are a few parts to this, I think. On the one hand, this can be taken quite literally. You need to look around, you need to see all that is happening in the room, and you need to know what your students are doing, whether they are playing with their cell phones, falling asleep, waiting to be called on, confused with the work, helping one another, or excited about the work and getting it. And so on. On the other hand, developing a vision for the classroom also involves creating a much more nuanced understanding of your role as the adult and leader in the room and of your students’ thinking and understanding at every step of the way.”
It is really clear that you are developing a lot in this area, and that is spectacular to see. Unlike the first time I visited your classroom when I saw students with raised hands not getting your attention, this time, you did a great job of quickly and effectively helping students who needed help and responding to student questions. It appeared that you really did see more of the room. It was also clear that you were thinking about student thinking and making that public, which is really important. On a number of occasions, in class discussion, you said something along the lines of, “I love that you’re building off of what so-and-so just said…” Wonderful. It shows that you’re paying attention, honoring their ideas and thoughts and creating a connected narrative throughout the class discussion.
And you asked your students to think about a lot in that class period! (Some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s thoughts on society as expressed in The Scarlett Letter , the breakdown of civil society in post-Hurricane
Katrina New Orleans, law and law enforcement and more.) You presented for them some wonderfully rich, interesting, compelling and complicated material, and you handled it all with clarity and focus.
Seriously well done.
I did wonder, as we talked after class, how you might have encouraged some of your quieter students to participate. At times, the same students shared their thoughts again and again. What strategies might you use to bring in more student voices? Writing and sharing? Small group discussion? Chalk talks or gallery talks? Not-so-cold calling? What else?
Transitions
While the class was very well organized with nice transitions from one type of activity to another type of activity, there were a few places of transition that are worth thinking more about.
First, before you showed the Frontline Law and Disorder video, you asked your students what “martial law” was. I know that there was some lag time while Raul set up the video and left the room to get a power cord for the laptop and that may have added to less than smooth transition, but I noticed that as you began that discussion of martial law, a few students continued to chat with each other. I would encourage you to demand - in whatever way works for you and the culture of the classroom that you’ve

created - the attention of all of the students before you move on to the next thing. The organization of those transition moments, when you give directions or pose questions or outline the upcoming activity, are crucial to the overall order and clarity of the class. If the students are not ready to move on yet, wait.
Talking over them is not a productive precedent to set.
Second, the end of the class period felt like a jumbled rush out the door. As students zipped up their backpacks, got up from their seats and pushed their chairs out, you were speaking to them. Again, I would encourage you to make the end of class just as focused and organized as the beginning. Before they begin to shuffle and head towards the door, say what you need to say and do what you need to do.
Sometimes wrapping up by having students summarize or reflect – verbally or in writing - on the main ideas or goals of the lesson can be a good strategy.
Balance
In your email to me a few days before the observation, you wrote, “So I guess my question this time is, how do I effectively give enough weight to the important issues that are raised by the events in the book and allow the students to discuss their thoughts and reactions, but also efficiently cover all the material I need to cover in the allotted time? Part of this is complicated by the fact that we had planned to show the
Frontline video on Friday, but the internet was down, so we have to squeeze it in on Tuesday. But in general I am struggling with knowing how much time I need to teach concepts or how much time is needed for classroom activities.”
This question of balance is really important, and you are definitely on the right track in spending time thinking about this. At the same time, there certainly isn’t an easy answer to this question. There were times in your class when some of your students had comments that they wanted to make but were unable to because you needed to move on to the next item. On the one hand, that’s a pretty inevitable situation and not a concern. On the other hand, how could you allow students to continue that conversation? If you organized small group discussions, might more students be able to participate and share what they want to? What do you think about creating a class blog where students could continue class discussions on their own time (not a simple proposition, I know!)? What other tools could you use to continue the conversation? At the same time, as the teacher, it is also important to teach your students that sometimes the needs of individual students will have to be superseded by the needs of the group as a whole. No matter the interests of some students (or even of your own), it’s sometimes just necessary to move on to the next thing.
All that said, I think that determining just how to strike the balance that you seek is best achieved by having clear goals in your mind for a given class period or unit or semester and by paying close attention to student thinking. What skills are your students mastering? Where are they struggling? What captures their interest? All of these questions, and more, have to come in to play as you think about how to create balance.
So, I feel as if I’ve answered with a non-answer, but the messy reality is that it’s a moving target.
Great stuff, Blythe. You should feel good about how things are going. Most telling is that you told me that you feel much more comfortable and competent in your role as lead teacher. That, it seems to me, is the most important measure of how you’re doing!
I look forward to the next visit. (On that next visit, I would like to pull Raul into the conversation for a bit. Let’s make that happen, please.)
Best.
Ryan