Classroom Observation


First Week

When I was doing my teacher assisting at Union High School, most of the time was pended on trying to get the students to do their work. Sometimes the students only came to class to sleep because most of them had a full time job and worked the whole night. Union High is an urban school and most of the students live in a challenging neighborhood. Most of students' parents have two jobs and students have too look up for themselves most of the time. I spend most of my time there telling them to do their work and helping others with directions. Most of the times, the teacher had prepared an awesome lesson plan but unfortunately he could not teach it. Instead he would give them work sheets and I would go around and helping the students with their work, which was waist of time because students had very little interest on learning.

There was also a time, when students could volunteer to share some of their good news. At this time students would spend from 5 minutes to 20 and sometimes half of the class hour talking about themselves. Students were allow to share their stories with every detail, which was what it used to take most of the class time. The teacher point of view was that when students share their stories the rest of the class was on listening mode and that it was good because students would listen better to the teacher when that happen.

My teacher always mention that it would be nice if he could teach all the students on his class at the same time instead of walking around and giving directions to one on one. He also mention that he would like to teach his lesson plans instead of just giving out work sheets. Another thing is that every day most of the students were behind on some of their work because some of them have missed classes. The teachers had to be carefully on the way he was teaching because many students missed class and not all of them had the same knowledge. That was another thing that my teacher always wanted to to, just teach the way he wanted to.


I attended to some of the teachers meetings and on my opinion, they where kinda waist of time. The meeting was about the way how teachers should teach and what they should take into consideration while teaching. Things that are so obvious to teachers. They told teachers, for example; "when students are misbehaving you need to go over classroom expectations" and "when students do not listen you need to write them up and call their parents". Or they would teach teachers on how to become more involved with students another example;" If you see a student not looking the same you need to talk to the an find out what they have". Thins like this are just make since to do them, this is why I think this kind of meeting are waist of time. I do support meeting where teachers need to be inform about new rules, teach a new strategy and other things that teachers need to improved their teaching.