This week, I completed the fieldwork requirement for this course. I was invited to observe a first grade classroom at a Catholic school located in Orange County.
I was warmly greeted by the teacher and students alike. I was provided with desk in the rear of the classroom. I observed that the classroom was very neat and orderly. The students were seated in five rows of five desks each. The room was cheerfully decorated. The bulletin boards and wall hanging reflect the various lessons being taught in the classroom. One board is devoted to coins and their value, another to religion, and a third to spring nature. This is the most organized classroom I have been to - quite a refreshing change! Often, the classrooms I visit are so cluttered with materials and wall decorations that I have to resist the urge to clean it up.
As this is a planning course, I approached my observation with the intent to observe the teacher's planning methods. The class is preparing to take final exams (yes, in first grade!), and the teacher is engaged in review for most of my observation. At all times, the teacher stands or sits behind a podium and asks the students pointed review questions. The students raise their hands and the teacher calls on them. The children are exceptionally well-behaved. However, as the morning progressed, I could not help but be bored with the teacher's method of instruction. If I was bored as an adult, I can only imagine how the six and seven-year-old students felt. Two hours of direct instruction seems excessively long for any student. However, for the whole of my observation this teacher did not engage in any other form of instruction. When it was time for the reading lessons, the teacher asked each student to read. Then, in skill & drill fashion, she asked them questions to test their reading comprehension. I could not help but wish that she had planned a more engaging and dynamic lesson. Why not have these children get into groups and create a project which not only displays their level of reading comprehension, but also aims to reach higher levels of understanding while strengthening other skills such as writing and creativity (not to mention letting them get out of their seat and break up the day). To be fair, these students were learning the required material and the teacher had excellent classroom management skills, but I can't help but wonder if she was addressing multiple intelligences and different learning styles. While I'm certain I will utilize direct instruction methods in my classroom, it will not be my style to rely on this method for all learning opportunities. I would go crazy with boredom (not to mention my students)!
On the second day of my observation, the teacher invited a guest teacher to give a lesson on geography. This man was not a teacher, but knowledgeable of geography due to his profession, which was in the business world. As a student of education, I was fascinated by this man's lesson. He began with what I would describe as an 'anticipatory set.' He began by asking the children vague questions to which he was seeking a particular answer. For example, he asks, "How do we know where we are going when we are going somewhere?" This question was confusing to me not to mention 24 first-graders. After many more round-about questions, he finally told the children the answer he was looking for - "maps". He then explained he was there to explain maps. He then took out a globe (not a map) and told the students that villages were inside of towns, which were inside of counties, which were inside of states, which were inside of countries, which were inside of continents, which were surrounded by oceans, and all of that makes up the Earth. Whoa! That is a lot of information for one 45-minute lesson. He then gave each student a map of the United States and asked them if they had ever been to a different state. Then, the chaos ensued. Each child wanted to recount a story of what state they had been to, when, and why. The poor man had a hard time regaining control. Each child wanted to recount his own story on where they went and why (Ex. "We went to Minnesota to see my aunt. I really wanted to bring home a hamster and my mom said they were allowed on the plane, so she told me that we could buy one when we got home, but we never got one.") At this point, the man looked completely defeated and allowed the children to enjoy coloring the map. This unravelling of what was otherwise an orderly classroom demonstrated that good planning promotes good behavior.
What went wrong here? First, the guest teacher did not effectively plan his lesson. He came to the classroom with the idea that he was going to talk about maps, which he did. But, what he failed to do was to start his planning with the question, "What do I want the students to know?" An appropriate response to this question for this age group could have been, "Where NY state is on a map of the US" or "Find the USA on the globe." These would have been appropriate skills for a 45-minute long lesson. Instead, he wandered all over the topic of maps and eventually lost control.
To a casual observer, this man's lesson may have seemed to go well. For a student of education, it was difficult to watch him struggle. I wondered why a man so well-educated and so knowledgeable on the chosen topic should have failed miserably. As I reflected on this question, I came to the realization that teachers of young children need not be experts on the topic being taught, but must be experts on children and how they learn. In my future practice, if I do not understand the learning process and effectively plan lessons and instruction around this process, my students will surely fail to learn what they need to know.
