Surprise!

     My mentor teacher was a part of an unofficial, observation, of which he was not informed. It was neat to see, but I found myself getting just as nervous as when I am being observed. It only lasted about twenty minutes because it was an informal observation. It was the principal and vice principal observing, and they each had Ipads to record information on or use as a check list. They observed my mentor while he was addressing the whole group. When it was time for a student work period, they began to ask students questions. I heard them ask what the children were learning about, what standard was being covered, or even questions about the specific problems on which they were working. There was no interaction with the teacher, only students. It was quite funny to see the student look up at the standard then back to the AP and recite it to her word for word. How else would we know the student is learning, right?

     I believe we will get to start working on our second piece of writing tomorrow. We did an organization activity today, working with organizing your ideas by content. The lead teacher read When I was Young in the Mountains, and then we made idea webs about a specific topic, or content, about ourselves. I didn’t get to talk to the writing coach afterwards, but I am predicting we will be using our idea webs to develop personal narratives.

     We finally finished Scantron testing, a norm reference test, today. What I’ve learned from this is that apparently you have to take away the kids learning time in order to see what they should be learning. We’ve missed three days of science and social studies because of this test, and the kicker is, half the kids don’t want to be taking the test and know it doesn’t count towards their grade so they just blow through it, doing poorly, and you don’t get a true reading. There will be little correlation between the test scores and what a lot of these children actually know or can do.

     One thing that I am taking home from lit centers today is that a vocal, creative group is certainly a great thing, but I’m going to have to figure out some way to make sure the imaginations are focused and we can chase a few less rabbits. It’s a golden problem as I like to say.