Observation One

My first observation took place at a Murfreesboro elementary school. This elementary school is one of the more urban schools in the Murfreesboro City School system. The school has a large population of students who speak a language other than English at home. The class that I observed had nine students, five boys and four girls, and was a second grade level two class. Students are placed in this class as a result of their scores on an English proficiency exam. Level two students are those that are starting to gain a solid grasp of English, but still need some additional instruction. The teacher I observed informed me that she believed a good percentage of these students would test out of ESL the following year.

The lesson began with students entering the class and sitting in a circle around a table. This class is a pullout, meaning that students leave their normal class to come and have ESL class. The lesson was a reflection on a book about walruses they read the day before. Once the students were seated the teacher passed out journals. All the journals were spiral notebooks with student names on the covers. The students then opened to a blank page and the teacher asked, “What can you tell me about walruses?” The students instantly became excited remembering everything they had learned from the reading the day before. Each student offered facts from the book while the teacher recorded. It was interesting to see students jumping up and down and raising their hands as high as possible hoping they would be next to give a fact. With all the excitement of recounted walrus facts, it was not uncommon for students to forget what they were going to say once they got called on. The teacher handled this problem by coaching them through, by asking simple questions like, “what the most interesting thing you can think of?” The students never seemed to feel any pressure; they seemed to understand that making mistakes was a part of learning. The class continued on like this for about forty-five minutes until the students were out of facts. It was amazing how much they remembered from the day before. The teacher later told me that she had intended for them to write a paragraph in their journals using all the walrus facts, but the students had remembered so much that they ran out of time and would have to do it the next day. Since the students wouldn’t have time to write the teacher asked them to read aloud short poems that they had written earlier in the week. The poems all followed a similar format but students inserted descriptive words about themselves. The lesson ended with the students cleaning up then lining up at the door.

The lesson gave students the opportunity to reflect on what they had learned. It was almost deceptive. Students thought that they were merely learning about walruses, but they were also learning all the language associated with walruses. Communicating with one another and the teacher was the main focus of the lesson, where students debated what facts were true and what facts needed to be amended to make them true (students would occasionally sort of embellish a fact to make it a little more interesting). The students were their own group each offering advice and adding to the conversation. The class on the whole was very informal it was essentially a forty-five minute conversation about walruses. I also found the poems that the students read at the end of class to be very interesting. Though there was predetermined format for the poems the each student, with a few exceptions, had something completely original. These poems gave students the opportunity to learn to shape language to meet their needs, and this is an essential skill for a literate person.

As a side note, the students cared about my presence only at the very beginning and the very end of class. In the beginning they simply asked who I was and what I was doing, and at the end they only wanted to know what I thought about their class. It is interesting that the students were more interested in the lesson than the new guy watching them and taking notes.

I greatly enjoyed my first observation, these kids are hilarious and their joy of learning really had me at a loss. I’m looking forward to going back.