Cross Visit Reflection
At School 1, I observed a 10th grade English class (Mrs. A), a 12th grade English class (Mr. B), and a 9th grade history class (Mr. C). The 12th grade English class was the first period of the day. There had been snow overnight, and due to the weather, a significant number of the students were absent, and several others came in late. The class was meeting in the media center and working on their senior projects. They were working on using the Internet to cite sources for their research papers. This seemed to be an ongoing activity, and students were at various stages of the process. They were divided into groups according to their topics and were collaborating to review the sources they had found. This teamwork and the freedom students were given to navigate the task to suit their own needs seemed a promising route to collaborative inquiry. It was clear that some students were more comfortable with using the Internet and pulling information from the sources they found. While I was intrigued by their leadership and willingness to help their fellow classmates, I might be concerned that other students might let these leaders do all the work and not learn the target skills associated with the lesson. Coming from a school with limited computer access for students, I was interested to see a 1-to-1 laptop ratio in action, and it seemed to come with benefits as well as challenges. While this access allows students to build the computer literacy that will be important in their lives beyond high school, the computers and freedom the students had with them seemed to sometimes become a distraction. I noticed several students viewing videos that seemed to have little or nothing to do with the assignment. On the other hand, the loose structure of the class allowed Mr. B to work with small groups of students and address their individual needs.
Noticeable to me in Mrs. A’s 10th grade English class was that it appeared to be much more tightly structured than Mr. B’s senior class. These students were also working on writing, but had detailed templates they were using to structure their writing. This seems like it could be helpful as a guide to keep students’ writing focused but could be problematic in terms of working toward student autonomy with writing. I might also worry that stressing a strict adherence to a template could lead to students who plug sentences into an outline without really internalizing or even considering why they are doing so. How, I wonder, might these templates be used as a scaffold to introduce a structure, but then gradually phased out?
Mr. C’s history class was learning about ancient trade routes, and after a short lecture and guided discussion about the complexity of trading during the time period, students played a game in which they practiced direct and indirect trading of imaginary goods. This activity seemed to engage students who had not been particularly vocal during the discussion, and though they were given a lot of freedom, the students’ role and objective during the game was clear and students seemed to remain on task throughout.
At School 2, I visited Mrs. D’s geometry class, Senora F’s Spanish class, Ms. G’s 11th grade English class, and Ms. H’s 9th grade English class. Like students at the School of the Future, all the students at SLA have their own laptops, but in several of the classes I observed, they did not play a central role. In the geometry class, students were working on a project and given the option of typing their responses, but they were not required to. In Ms. H’s class, students did not use their laptops at all in their discussion of Hamlet. The structure of Ms. H’s class, I was a bit surprised to see, was quite similar to my CM’s classes. Students were split into groups in which they explored the uses and meanings of an assigned word, such as “blood” and “sleep” throughout the play. They then shared their group word webs with the rest of the class and applied the word to a character of their choosing. After that, the students read along with a recording of the play, stopping to discuss points along the way.
In Ms. G’s English class and Senora F’s Spanish class, on the other hand, the computers figured much more prominently. Both classes had students work on assignments through Canvas. The Spanish students typed sentences using vocabulary to describe their favorite class, and the English students read their choice of several texts that had been made available to them online and which they would be using as resources for an upcoming literary analysis essay. Interestingly, these two computer-focused classes were more teacher-centered than the two classes that did not rely as much on computer access. In both classes, most of the speaking was done by the teacher, then the students used the computers to write or read, but did not have much interaction with each other. How can computers be used to encourage collaboration among students, rather than serving as isolating forces?
Noticeable to me in Mrs. A’s 10th grade English class was that it appeared to be much more tightly structured than Mr. B’s senior class. These students were also working on writing, but had detailed templates they were using to structure their writing. This seems like it could be helpful as a guide to keep students’ writing focused but could be problematic in terms of working toward student autonomy with writing. I might also worry that stressing a strict adherence to a template could lead to students who plug sentences into an outline without really internalizing or even considering why they are doing so. How, I wonder, might these templates be used as a scaffold to introduce a structure, but then gradually phased out?
Mr. C’s history class was learning about ancient trade routes, and after a short lecture and guided discussion about the complexity of trading during the time period, students played a game in which they practiced direct and indirect trading of imaginary goods. This activity seemed to engage students who had not been particularly vocal during the discussion, and though they were given a lot of freedom, the students’ role and objective during the game was clear and students seemed to remain on task throughout.
At School 2, I visited Mrs. D’s geometry class, Senora F’s Spanish class, Ms. G’s 11th grade English class, and Ms. H’s 9th grade English class. Like students at the School of the Future, all the students at SLA have their own laptops, but in several of the classes I observed, they did not play a central role. In the geometry class, students were working on a project and given the option of typing their responses, but they were not required to. In Ms. H’s class, students did not use their laptops at all in their discussion of Hamlet. The structure of Ms. H’s class, I was a bit surprised to see, was quite similar to my CM’s classes. Students were split into groups in which they explored the uses and meanings of an assigned word, such as “blood” and “sleep” throughout the play. They then shared their group word webs with the rest of the class and applied the word to a character of their choosing. After that, the students read along with a recording of the play, stopping to discuss points along the way.
In Ms. G’s English class and Senora F’s Spanish class, on the other hand, the computers figured much more prominently. Both classes had students work on assignments through Canvas. The Spanish students typed sentences using vocabulary to describe their favorite class, and the English students read their choice of several texts that had been made available to them online and which they would be using as resources for an upcoming literary analysis essay. Interestingly, these two computer-focused classes were more teacher-centered than the two classes that did not rely as much on computer access. In both classes, most of the speaking was done by the teacher, then the students used the computers to write or read, but did not have much interaction with each other. How can computers be used to encourage collaboration among students, rather than serving as isolating forces?