Valdosta State University Department of Psychology PSY310  Educational Psychology Instructor: John H. Hummel, Ph.D.

Field Observation Log Ima A. Student PSY 310A

Monday, 10/4/94, 8:27-9:27

Today I began my observations at Abecedarian High School under the supervision of Mrs. Spelling. Mrs. Spelling has been teaching for 7 years and I am glad I have the opportunity to work in an experienced teacher’s class. I hope to learn about how all the stuff we are covering in PSY 310 actually makes it into the real world. I suspect that much of it does not make the transition. My experiences so far in my classes suggest that the category of information our text and class referred to as inert knowledge probably applies to the majority of concepts, principles, and facts we have to learn in our education classes because they do not generalize to real classrooms in real schools.

Mrs. Spelling's class is freshman biology. As I understand it, the class time rotates between lecture/discussion days and laboratory days. I am not certain, but I think Tuesdays and Thursdays are designated as lab days, and Mondays and Wednesday are used to present new content. Fridays are supposed to be when the students write up their lab projects (is this seatwork/independent practice or distributed practice? I think it is the latter even though it is done in class because the students are not just practicing new skills they have acquired, but also integrating it at the synthesis level of the Bloom et al. taxonomy.) Whether this schedule is actually followed or not remains to be seen.

The students began to troop in at 8:15 and everyone was seated by 8:25 (before the the tardy bell rang). I counted 33 students in this class. I really think that 33 in a science class (especially one with a lab) is too many.

The teacher did not take a roll. Instead, she started asking questions. Most of her questions seemed to tap into either the knowledge or comprehension levels of the taxonomy instead of the higher levels, and she didn’t ask questions the way we had discussed in class. For example, she called the student’s name first then asked the question instead of stating the question (which allows everyone to start developing an answer to it) then calling on a student randomly.

It finally dawned on me that her questioning (oral probes) were serving two purposes in this lesson. First, she was checking the students’ progress (whether the students did in fact understand what had been covered previously), and her questions were also serving as the review (step 2 of the lesson) for the day’s lesson. The questions also seemed to get the students’ attention so they also served as step 1.

Thursday, 10/7, 8:27- 9:30

Today is supposed to be a laboratory day but as Shakespeare (Bacon?) pointed out, “...the best laid plans of mice and men, oft gang a gley.” The reason I say this is because about 10 minutes into the lesson, announcements came over the PA system. The lesson, of course, immediately stopped. This had the effect of breaking both Mrs. Spelling and the students’ momentum. After the messages, she had to sort of start over (after getting the students refocused on the topic) and it was a good 15 minutes before she was back to where she’d been before the interruption!

Interestingly, I don’t believe she uses objectives to guide the students. They are supposed to read the text and figure out (perhaps based on her class presentations and in lab) what the important content in each section is. This is not good. I bet her students would perform (make higher grades on her assessments--though I haven’t yet seen any) if she would share her objectives with the students (if she has any!) and if the assessments were tied to her objectives.

Once she assigned their homework, she allowed them the last few minutes of class time to begin working on it. Is this “finishing early” or recognizing that even at this level, the public school is a teaching environment and some students need the structure of the class in order to be motivated to at least start on homework (it looked like distributed practice rather than integration because it dealt only with that day’s presentation; not previous lessons). I helped one girl. She didn’t understand the questions at the back of the chapter (which they were to answer).

To help her, I found a thesaurus and we looked in it and the text for definitions of some of the terms that were confusing her. I could have simply rephrased the questions, but I wanted her to be actively involved with the process. We rephrased (hopefully making them more meaningful for her) two of the six questions before it was time to leave.

I felt like I have helped this student because by teaching her, a bit, how to decode questions so she can grasp what is required, I have empowered her in that she now is somewhat more metacognitively aware. As it said in the Bible (and similar proverbs in the Koran), to feed hungry people helps them for a day; to teach them how to fish will help them feed themselves for a lifetime.

Last Updated: May 20, 1997