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Classroom Observation

Kevin Quinn

University of New England

Supervision and Evaluation of Instructional Personnel, EDU 704

February 12, 2017

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1. What class or grade did you observe, for how long, and with how many students in the

room?

The class I observed was a grade 8, U.S. history class. There were 30 students in the

class, and the class was forty-six minutes long.

2. For which Danielson elements were you observing? Why were these selected?

I chose to focus this observation on Danielson's (2007) Domain 2: The Classroom

Environment and Domain 3: Instruction, specifically Component 3a: Communicating with

Students. I chose Domain 2 because this teacher identified these areas as part of his professional

practice goals for this year. As a middle school teacher, classroom environment is one of the

most important components of teaching at this level and can be, at times, one of the most

challenging as well.

3. What did you notice about the teacher’s approach to those elements?

As the students were coming into the room and taking their seats, the teacher asked the

students to take out their previous night’s homework and pass it in. The students passed all

homework from the back rows of the room to the front where the teacher collected each pile.

This transition into the room and the collection of materials was “seamless” and obviously well-

rehearsed with the “students assuming some responsibility for smooth operation” (Danielson,

2007, p. 72).
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The teacher began the class by reviewing the previous day’s lesson. This aided in

connecting the current lesson with students’ prior knowledge and helped to make “the purpose of

the lesson or unit clear, including where it is situated within the broader learning…” (Danielson,

2007, p. 80). The teacher then communicated the expectations of the lesson within the first few

moments of class to his students by not only writing the objective on the board in a clear and

visible location, but the teacher also began the lesson by reviewing the objective with the class.

The ability to clearly communicate expectations and objectives to students about a lesson makes

the learning purposeful. And, "a fundamental assumption of the framework for teaching is that

teaching is purposeful; that purpose should be clear to the students" (Danielson, 2007, p. 77).

The objective was written in a KUD (Know; Understand; Do) format, so the students understood

what they would be learning, why it is important, and what they will be doing with that

information (Danielson, 2007).

Lesson objectives should be written in kid-friendly language and not simply put on the

board as part of a procedural checklist in case an administrator pops their head into the room. In

this case, the teacher made “the purpose of the lesson or unit clear” to the students thereby

“enhance[ing] the learning experience” (Danielson, 2007, p. 77). This is a characteristic of the

“Distinguished” category under expectations for learning in Danielson’s framework: Doman 3a.

The teacher began the lesson with an individual task by asking each student to identify

what they believed to be examples of freedom of expression and whether or not the students

believed that schools had the right to limit their freedom of expression. This activity served two

critical functions: it got the students thinking about the topic and “connected the students’

knowledge and experience” (Danielson, 2007, p. 80). During the whole-class share out on the
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responses, misconceptions about what constituted acceptable forms of freedom of expression

were identified. This demonstrated how the teacher “anticipate[d] possible student

misunderstanding[s]” (Danielson, 2007, p. 80), and used this anticipation guide activity as a

means of addressing those misconceptions before the lesson began.

During the activity in which students were given a few minutes to individually write

down their thoughts on the two questions that were provided to them in their groups, all of the

students were observed partaking in the task. Additionally, during the whole-class share out of

their responses, and again during their small group work discussions, “students demonstrated

through their active participation, curiosity, and taking initiative that they value the importance

of the content” (Danielson, 2007, p. 69). The teacher had created a culture for learning in his

room, and the evidence was in the way the students entered the classroom ready to work, actively

participated in the learning activities, and interacted with one another and the teacher in a manner

that “reflected the importance of the work undertaken by both students and the teacher”

(Danielson, 2007, p. 67).

4. How did the teacher (or you) know that the students’ understood the lesson?

The teacher's objective for the lesson was to have the students be able to identify and

analyze events that involved school children and whether or not their constitutional rights were

violated. By the end of the lesson, the students should understand their rights as they relate to

freedom of expression in school, freedom of speech in school newspapers, and protection from

searches by school officials.

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While the groups were discussing each court case, the teacher monitored each small

group, and stopped one group to review with them the procedure for counting group votes. This

continuous monitoring served as a way to formatively assess the students during the course of

the lesson and to once again ensure that the “directions and procedures are clear to students” and

any student misunderstandings are immediately addressed (Danielson, 2007, p. 80). When the

groups shared out how they ruled on the first Supreme Court case, they had to explain why they

decided to vote the way they did and use evidence from the case in order to support their

response. It was evident from the structure of the lesson with the student groups being

strategically designed, the anticipation discussion, the question prompts, and the level of

discourse from the students, that all of these “[had] been specifically designed to supply

diagnostic information” (Danielson, 2007, p. 86). The teacher also provided immediate feedback

to students while monitoring group discussions with the goal of engaging students further in the

learning.

5. What suggestions do you have at this time to help this teacher improve on the selected

elements?

One suggestion that I had for the teacher was not in the actual execution of the lesson, but

in the lesson plan and discussion during our pre-conference meeting. Under the category of how

the teacher would differentiate the learning for students in the room, one of the items he listed

was to give some of the stronger groups more cases to look at. Even though this teacher has five

years of teaching experience, it is a common misconception that differentiating for higher level

students means providing them with more work, and differentiating for students that need more

support is to provide them with less work. Tomlinson (2001) emphasizes in her text on
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differentiation that differentiating is taking student interest, choice, and readiness into

consideration when planning lessons and carrying out varied approaches to the content, process

and product. Differentiation is understanding how a student learns and providing students with

choice of how to demonstrate that learning.

I also suggested having some kind of closure for this activity because, while they did run

out of time with finishing the last discussion of the final court case, the class just ended without

having some way of pulling all the learning together in a way that synthesized everything they

accomplished that period.

6. Beyond the selected elements, what did you notice about the classroom?

To begin the lesson, the teacher used an anticipation activity for the "Do Now" as a way

to introduce the topics that they would be discussing. The class moved from independent work

to small group to whole class which is what Tomlinson (2001) describes as scaffolding both

teacher and peer support in order to understand a concept though an activity matrix.

The teacher also used videos on the individual court case decisions in order to provide

students with a visual of what the actual Supreme Court decision for each case was after the

students voted on each case. The videos provided a visual form of learning as an additional

modality for teaching. Finally, there were multiple learning methods accounted for in this lesson

with regards to writing, discussing, analyzing, and synthesizing information.

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References

Danielson, C. (2007). Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching. 2nd Ed.

Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Alexandria, VA.

Tomlinson, C. A. (2001). How to differentiate instruction in mixed-ability classrooms. (2 ed.).

Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development.