Classroom Observation Paper

“Educational practice is necessarily based on the assumption that students are willing to engage in educational activities that they will lend their cooperation and support to the process in their education. Students who do not offer such cooperation, who are unmotivated, present significant challenges” (Williams and Ivey, 2001, 75). High school school-children show the most trouble with cooperation and motivation; they only have a few more years of schooling and for some pupils that is the end of their education. That was one of the main reasons why I wanted to observe a high school classroom; the other main reason is because I have actually considered teaching high school grades. I observed Ms. Edith Stone and her Algebra II mathematics classroom.

The Algebra II course was a college-prep lecture; they were at a higher level than a general class. With the title of the course, I expected to see well-behaved, attentive learners, who were interested in mathematics. When the apprentices did become disruptive or talkative, I expected that the teacher would discipline the students by sending them out into the hall or to the office, as occurred in my high school classes. I also expected to see a teacher that challenged the students’ knowledge of the subject, and pupils who gladly accepted that challenge. Finally, I anticipated the class lessons to go as follows: collect homework, class notes which are copied by the students, time set aside for the children to practice this work via worksheets and example problems, and then the assignment of homework for the next day. These expectations influenced the ways that I observed and reacted to Ms. Stone’s mathematics

The class was filled with loud, inattentive children. When the school-children became disruptive, the teacher would just continue to teach like nothing happened; she mentioned to me on the side that, “It is their loss if they are not paying attention to the lesson…I am not going to stop the lesson just because of two or three of the children.” Those scholars are an interruption to the other students who are actually paying attention and trying to learn; Ms. Stone could have sent them to the hall for distractions. If the school-children were verbally being preoccupied, they were technologically sidetracked. Some pupils were playing games on their iPads, and diverting the attention from some of the other students. The grades were so bad that Ms. Stone had to throw away the quizzes and prompt the class for “pop quiz” with the same material on it for the next day. My anticipation for the class lessons were also incorrect; homework was submitted online, course notes were given and completed to the pupils via the teacher, and the assignment was online to complete and submit online. The learners accessed the homework AND the required textbook online with the iPad the school provided. Only a handful of the scholars were accepting the mathematical challenge in that classroom, and those scholars were the sophomores of the