I recently took over our section of geometry in my student teaching and had my first observation. This observation focused on the level of engagement from students over the course of the hour.
At this point I’m still working on setting classroom norms and expectations so with this observation I was hoping to get a sense of where the class was at and what I still need to address. The first aspect I feel like I need to address in participation when I pose a question to the class. I want the class to have more discussion and more involvement from my students. I’m looking into the possibility of using Socrative to possibly jump-start this. I also need to work on giving more time so that everyone has time to think of answer so that I can get responses from more students.
The other big area that I need to address is what my expectation are for when students are working on homework. Ideally I’d like to discuss the day’s topic for about 15 minutes and then try to have at least 20 minutes for students to work on any homework they have. The goal of this is so that students have the support that they need while doing the homework so they can ask any questions they still have before they try to attempt it at home. However during yesterday’s time for homework there were several students who decided the time would be better used as a social hour.
Now that I have a clearer picture of what my expectations are and what the classroom dynamic is like we have some things that are going to be addressed more explicitly. Overall I think we are off and running to a great semester!
Update: A about a day or so after I wrote this originally I saw on Twitter about using a resource called Plickers, which gives each student a unique card to select from four different answers and the teacher uses their smartphone or tablet to scan the responses. I’m thinking this might be a better tool to use then Socrative.
As easy as 3.14159 