Describing the Classroom Context Through Ethnographic Eyes

Central Crossing High School is part of the South Western City School District.  It opened in 2002, as the district continued to expand with an influx of immigrants.  There are different levels of classes beginning with Sheltered classes specifically for ELL students, as well as Silver and Gold Dyad classes designating different ability groupings.  My focal class is Heather Barnes first and second period Silver Dyad of Freshman English.  During my observations the class was learning the finer details about writing a five-paragraph essay.  The topic of their essay, “what would life be like if you were blind, deaf, and mute,” was chosen to lead into their reading of The Miracle Worker by William Gibson, a play centering around the life of Helen Keller.

The classroom I’m observing is very different from any I’d observed before.  Dyad classes are arranged so that the teacher is actually instructing two classes at once, in a double classroom.  This means that there are two adjoining rooms that have an optional wall between them.  Heather Barnes and Melissa Fischer (the social studies team-teacher) have opted to do nearly all their lessons jointly, meaning the wall is rarely, if ever, closed.  The arrangement of the desks is in rows, reflecting the teacher-centered orientation of the class.  Though, while talking to Heather, she revealed that the arrangement of rows wasn’t her favorite, but having the double classroom made it a necessity if all the desks were to fit.

Each lesson begins with either Heather or Melissa going over “housekeeping” matters.  They review paperwork and permission slips that need to be signed, extra curricular activities that are happening at the school, and other similar topics.  After that the class will review what they went over in the past session.  In the case of the class session that I observed Heather began the class by asking students questions about the brainstorming they’d done the previous day.

It is interesting to note that though Heather and Melissa teach in a Dyad classroom, the desks remain facing the front of each individual room, rather than the back of each room, and thus the center of the joined room.  During instruction the teacher will remain in this center area, though most often the students backs will remain towards her.  Sometimes the students will twist around in their seats, but most often will remain facing away, giving the appearance of being unengaged in the lesson.

When the lesson writing five-paragraph essays continues today Heather begins by asking students what step they think comes next in the writing process, now that they’ve done some brainstorming.  One student responses “Start the paragraphs?”  Heather agrees, and begins to put up her mini-posters describing the different steps in the writing process.  She put up the brainstorming steps they used the day before, and moves onto describe the writing of the intro, body paragraphs, and conclusion.

The use of the mini-posters is a strategy that Heather employs, especially in her Silver Dyad class, to provide additional help to students who are more visual learners, or need a little extra help understanding the material.  After the class she asked Alison Cartwright, the special education teacher who is in the classroom to help out during the Silver Dyad class, for some help coming up with ideas to better help the students understand the steps for writing a five-paragraph essay.

As Heather walks the students through the steps in writing the five paragraph essay, she is subtly, or maybe not so subtly, providing them with a template to follow when writing their essay.  She follows up on this template idea by having them complete a highlighting editing exercise later in the writing process.  Basically, this exercise has forced the students to take a careful look at what they’ve written.  They need to highlight their hook, thesis, topic sentences, conclusion and clincher, as well as identify 3 specific details in each body paragraph and work on transitioning between paragraphs.  The heavy-duty scaffolding that this provides the students seemed to be extremely helpful in keeping them focused on the task of writing the essay, and not feeling too overwhelmed.

After Heather had gone over all the steps in the writing process she passed back the brainstorming papers the students had completed the previous day.  The timing for this was wise, because if she had passed them back before going over the basic steps of how to write a five paragraph essay, then the students would likely not have paid as much attention, and may have begun writing their essays without listening to the instructions.

During the classes I’ve observed there have been both minor and major interruptions.  The minor ones are often dealt with in one of two ways: by quietly confronting students or using non-verbal classroom management skills, such as proximity, or alternatively by confronting the student in front of the whole class.  While I am unsure of the wisdom of confronting an adolescent in front of all of his peers, it does seem to work in most cases they’ve employed it.  Heather, Melissa and Alison seems to have a good sense of which students will respond favorably to this public calling out, and which will not.  In most cases it seems to be a type of jesting that is okay due to the bond that they’ve developed with the students.  In the case of major interruptions, I’ve seen things get a little out of hand when a student is unmotivated and vocally angry, and when the teacher rises to the taunt that he gives.  The whole class quieted and the student was trying to verbally spar with the teacher.  Heather finally just told him to “Get out!” and I presume that he went down to the principal’s office.

Report of Interview with Mentor Teacher

Heather Barnes has taught since 1997, and has taught freshmen English at Central Crossing High School, in the Southwest City School District, since it opened in 2002.  She got her Bachelor’s from The Ohio State University and “was one of the last groups to be certified to teach with a bachelor’s only.”  She later went on to get her Master’s in Educational Leadership from the University of Dayton.  She always knew she wanted to be an English teacher.  Her grandma was an English teacher and she knew that “being a teacher would allow [her] to have a family and a career.”

Heather’s first period class, my focal class, is called a Silver Dyad, and is an inclusion class, working on reading intervention.  The average reading level for this class is about third grade, though it ranges from about first to eighth grade level readers.  Her other two classes are Gold Dyad classes, which are more like honors classes.  Heather’s classes take place in a very interesting environment.  She team-teaches with Melissa Fischer, a Modern World History teacher.  All of the freshmen classes at Central Crossing used to be taught in triads of English, History, and Business, but now Heather and Melissa are the only ones left.  They’ve “fought to keep [their] class structured as a dyad.”

Both Heather and Melissa feel that there students make connections more easily between history and literature in their unique set-up than they would if the classes were taught separately.  This is evidenced by the fact that they plan their lessons together to be sure that the topics align as well as possible.  For example, the Gold Dyad classes have just moved into a new unit.  Melissa’s class is studying the Russian Revolution, and Heather’s class is starting to read Animal Farm.  Heather said when they did this unit last year “you could really tell which kids had Melissa’s class first, because they made the connections between the Russian leaders and the characters in the book without any prompting from me.”  The joint planning, and often joint teaching, really seems to benefit the students and aid their learning by helping them to more easily make connections between subject areas.

The Silver Dyad class, first and second period, is the class that will be my focal class.  Heather thinks this class will work out best for me simply due to scheduling reason.  This class has more flexibility with pacing, allowing me to jump in, as well as allowing me to go slower with the teaching so I can do better too.  Most of the students in the Silver Dyad come into Heather’s English class hating to read and write, so one of Heather’s goals is to, if not help the students enjoy reading, at least make it a task that is no longer so arduous.  One of the ways she works to accomplish this is by always doing all the reading for class out loud, this way students aren’t burdened with reading for homework that they’d struggle to understand.  Something interesting that Heather has noticed is that her “stronger readers tend to not like writing, and [her] stronger writers really don’t like to read.”  One of the ways she encourages every one to read is through peer pressure.  When the class reads aloud students call on one another to read, and when called on, the student must read at least one sentence before calling on someone else.

The thing Heather enjoys most about teaching is the bond that it allows her to build with students.  She is able to use this bond with students to help motivate them, which is one of the biggest challenges with her Silver Dyad class.  The students are also willing to be much more open in class discussion because they know that Heather cares about them.  I witnessed her bond with the students first hand when, during their five minute break between classes, students would come up to socialize with her, rather than go out into the hall to socialize with friends in other classes.  They talk to her about their other classes, their extra-curricular activities, and they social lives outside of school.  The students enjoy being around Heather, just as much as she enjoys being around them, and it shows through all aspects of her teaching.