This was my second visit to my independent school placement in center city with Teacher P's second grade classroom. We had morning meeting again where we played an interactive game discussing what we were going to do during the weekend. During the student's half hour at PE, Teacher P and I discussed the upcoming math lesson, and how one student struggles to work independently with his math work. She told me that this student, T, will be starting during this coming week to take medication for ADD symptoms. I am not sure if he has been diagnosed for ADD--I assume so since he is starting medication. She expressed some concern about never having taught a student on this medication before. She also mentioned that the adjustment process may be a difficult one, and that she was anticipating that. I am curious to see how T is doing this week since he started taking the medication--updates to come.

School: Elementary school (Pre-K – 5th grade) in West Philadelphia

Class: Kindergarten

Class size: 23 students

Teacher: Ms. Lowe

Aide: Ms. Monay

**Pseudonyms are used in these notes.

Placement

Field Notes #2

February 5, 2013

Last week at the end of my praxis visit, the main classroom teacher and I decided to implement a system of notes to guide my visits to her classroom. This is mainly because she has a meeting for 20 minutes when the students first arrive so there is another teacher in the classroom directing morning meeting. So, when I walked into the classroom today, there was a box labeled “Teacher Ellen” that had several sticky notes inside of it.

The first sticky gave me instructions for the beginning of the day: “please take down the New Years posters on the bulletin board at the back of the classroom and put up the new posters in the box.” The classroom has several bulletin boards, each of which consistently display student work. However, not all student work can be displayed on the board because this teacher teaches the entire 6th grade language arts/social studies classes. Sometimes, the work that is displayed on the boards is chosen randomly (as evidenced by the system I used last week to hang up posters in the hallways, basically put them up until there is no more space). However, sometimes, the student work chosen for display is based on the grade that the students received. Today, that is the case with the student work that I was asked to put up.  All of the work in the pile to hang up had a received a grade of A+, A, or A-.

In word.

http://schoolmutiny.tumblr.com/
http://zoecohenart.wordpress.com/

Please use this space for this week.  Thanks.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013 - Field Placement Visit #1

As I approached the brown brick building of Excellence Charter School (ECS) at Learning Campus, groups of African-American students lingered around the front door and off to the side of the building talking to each other before school began. I entered the two glass doors and notified a white-male teacher at the front door to inform him that I was here for field placement with Jane Bard. (Jane Bard is a first year teacher). He directed me to the front desk to sign in. After I signed in, I went to Room 107 and saw my host teacher sitting in front of her laptop preparing for the day. Ms. Bard welcomed me and provided me a clipboard with three sheets of the assigned seating for the three math courses I would be observing.

When the first school bell rang, 10th graders began trickling into the classroom for their first class of the day -- geometry. Ms. Bard greeted her students saying "Good morning Tom" and "Good morning Anna" by calling out her students’ first names. She then asked her students how their internships were going. When they saw the new assigned seats, some of Ms. Bard's students called out, "We got new seats?!" Mrs. Bard tried to calm her class down by having her students focus on the Do-Now, which is a silent and independent task.  Since this was a new semester and a new year, Mrs. Bard had some questions she wanted to know from students. They were:

1. Which expectations will be most challenging for you?