Science Classroom Visit

Today I had the opportunity to visit another science classroom at West Perry High school, before I begin my student teaching. The classroom I visited was a 4th period Biology class.

This visit was a little bit different than other visits I made. This classroom was chosen specifically because this teacher works with the students who need extra help to understand the material they are being taught. Although I did not get the opportunity to visit one of her classes where she has 100% IEP students, I could clearly see that the students she was working with needed extra help.

The objective of the lesson today was to focus on introducing the students to the process of mitosis. During the class, the students were very interested in learning to me it didn't seem like the teacher was even pushing the students to be interested,

The way this teacher was working with the students was that she started with a "Q&A" which is basically a longer version of a bell work to get the students to focus on learning. This worked very well with this particular group of students. At no point during this class was the teacher "giving" the students answers to the questions she asked though, she would push the students to find the right answers on their own.

There was a few comments I wrote down, this is the teachers first year back in a high school, since she moved to the middle school 10 years ago. One comment I specifically heard from a student was that she "hates school" but "loves this class" I thought that really showed the character of the teacher, her students enjoy her class so much that it is the reason they even come to school.

This teacher really relied on floating around the room to keep the students on track, but she really managed to keep their interest most of the time. she would keep going back to information that they already learned and connect it for the students so that they would keep interest. In order to make sure the students knew what she was expecting, she would ask questions throughout the presentation.

Overall I thought this was a really good class for me to visit, getting experience with students from a "low level" classroom was really the best use of my time here, as the majority of my experience is with the "high achieving" students in other science classes.