Field Experience 2/2/07

The lesson I observed on Friday, February 2nd was both teacher and student led. For the first part of my observation, the teacher had the students quiz each other on state capitals. Then the teacher went over a worksheet with them for the science lesson on weather and again the students were to work with one another to quiz one another and ask questions. This is a pattern I often observe in this class. The teacher will go over a couple of points with the students and then they are to work in pairs or groups. The advantage of this for this class is that many of the students love this. They get into the idea of being a teacher to one another and stay on task. The problem is that a portion of the class who are less intrinsically motivated do not benefit as much from this exercise. The students are to all have recorded the same notes, but some students do not have the correct notes, imcomplete notes, or just cannot understand their notes. Many of the students expressed private concerns that they had not yet gone over some of the worksheets and did not have a handle on the topic.
I believe that the emphasis in science in this class is on facts and not concepts. The students I was working with had great questions and were eager to fit the pieces together and the worksheets were not satisfying their interest. I am not sure how the material was covered in the first place, but I think that these students would benefit from seeing film clips to explaing the concepts and doing small scale experiements to see the weather patterns.
The teacher talks to these students on their level and uses examples from their lives, but again this only engages about half of the students. I think the self-quizzing is a good idea, but I also think some students may not be ready for the self-quizzing and need more guidance in getting the answers. This class calls for a high level of differentiation and it is important for the students who are capable fo work independently to practice this, but some students require more attention.
In my own classroom, I hope to be able to impart both conceptual and conrete knowledge onto the students. Maybe by focusing on one weather aspect like a high pressure system and low pressure system and making it interactive with meteorogical terms and maps. I would maybe have the students use the symbols on meteorogloy to become their own forecasters. I would also be sure to move into concrete facts for the SOLS and use both teacher directed reviewing and student directed studying.