Classroom placementsBoth my 10th and 12th grade classrooms were composed of a dynamic group of students who arrived in the fall with a vast range of interests, academic experience, preparation, and ability. Behavioral and learning disables were prevalent but inconsistently diagnosed and accommodated. This was in part due to insufficiently updated or serviced IEPs; to illustrate, one special education teacher began the year with a caseload of 40 students, well above the legally mandated limit of 22. A number of my students had previously been in a work program at their old school that I was told consisted of doing janitorial work around the school rather than being in a classroom, and they were frustrated and ill-prepared to suddenly find themselves on an academic track.
Both my classroom teachers discovered students with significant literacy issues in their classrooms, including students who had not yet learned to read. Mr. Ford acquired a literacy test and began administering it himself to identify student's reading levels to better modify assignments to their needs. Ms. Ricci's solution for accommodating these students was assigning me to work with them in a small group in the "prep room" off the main classroom for a period of time in the fall before I began lead teaching the class. We were fortunate enough to be assigned a tutor in the spring, who took over these prep room duties as well as helping struggling students in the classroom, too. |
Class information station (10th grade classroom)
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In my second fieldwork notebook entry from the fall, I described my 10th grade classroom as follows: "The focus of the classroom is on individual work, for the most part. A few minutes of each class are usually spent with the teacher reading from the board for students to directly copy notes, and otherwise they are given worksheets to do. Students generally copy answers from each other or do not complete the work, and we have almost never spent time discussing the readings contained in the worksheets or reviewing answers later. [Ms. Ricci] told me that when they receive their computers, they will see their grades and that will spur them to work harder, most likely, and so she seems to be biding her time until then" (Kates, Entry #2, 2013).
Her teaching did in fact evolve through the fall as class sizes decreased due to re-rostering and students received their laptops (although approximately one third of students did not have working laptops on any given day throughout the year). However, the extreme mix of abilities in both grade level classrooms certainly influenced the teachers' curriculum and assignments to be light on student input or discussion and heavy on teacher-focused direction and independent yet scaffolded assignments. For instance, a typical assignment for Ms. Ricci would be as follows: read an article, answer questions in comment boxes along the side of the article organized into four categories of questions (device, purpose, inference, global), complete a "purpose formula" at the end of the reading assignment, and possibly take a quiz on the material.
Her teaching did in fact evolve through the fall as class sizes decreased due to re-rostering and students received their laptops (although approximately one third of students did not have working laptops on any given day throughout the year). However, the extreme mix of abilities in both grade level classrooms certainly influenced the teachers' curriculum and assignments to be light on student input or discussion and heavy on teacher-focused direction and independent yet scaffolded assignments. For instance, a typical assignment for Ms. Ricci would be as follows: read an article, answer questions in comment boxes along the side of the article organized into four categories of questions (device, purpose, inference, global), complete a "purpose formula" at the end of the reading assignment, and possibly take a quiz on the material.