Classroom Observation

Twenty students shuffled in and took their places spread out across the Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse 103 classroom. As class progressed, some students filed in late, others came and left, but none were disruptive to the activity in the classroom. Another student actively participated but couldn’t seem to stay in his seat; he stood and moved around the classroom the entire time. It was 1 p.m. on February 18, 2020 but no one seemed sleepy after lunch or too distracted to learn. One of the main things I observed in this classroom was active engagement from most students.

              The teacher started with a brief agenda presented in power point form. The class primarily focused on their current project, a discourse community ethnography. The teacher began with a quick write prompt, a question which students answered on notecards, which were provided. The question they answered was, “If your mood today was control the weather outside, what is the forecast? Why?” After giving the students time to write, she invited them to share their responses. I think this exercise really helped them settle into class and get ready to write and think about writing.

Then, they discussed James Gee’s definitions of a discourse community, as found in their text Writing About Writing. They compared Gee’s work to previous texts they had read. The teacher then moved to a discussion of discourse communities, using the metaphor of high school cliques. She asked the question: can you shift from one group to another and how? This opened up class discussion about different groups students had belonged to and groups they tried to enter. The teacher defined some key terms from the reading and reviewed the aspects of a discourse community. I observed students taking notes in notebooks and laptops. One student used her phone for taking notes. Initially this student was admonished for using a cell phone, until the teacher observed that the student was using the phone for notetaking. Even when the teacher’s content was primarily lecture, she broke up the lecture by asking questions and encouraging classroom discussion.

As part of the classroom discussion, students brainstormed their own definitions of “mushfake” and “imposter syndrome.” After this lecture and discussion back-and-forth conversation, the teacher took a moment to check in. She asked students to reflect and write in their notes, considering discourses they would like to join and approach through the apprenticeship process. Their answers would serve as a potential topic for their discourse ethnography project. While they wrote, the teacher walked around the classroom. Then she invited them to share their reflection with a partner. She stepped into a few of these conversations.

The teacher reviewed some of the activities toward their project: an interview, observation and collecting genres related to a specific discourse community. She introduced a genre activity for small groups. She had students count off for this groups so that students wouldn’t be working with the same people they normally sit near. Each small group received a collection of artifacts from a specific genre which they then discussed and wrote down answers to questions posted in the power point. One group had several programs from musical performances, another had wedding invitations and another brochures for local museums. There were five groups in all, each with a different type of literature. The students looked for recurrent features, identifying and describing patterns. They looked specifically for content, structure, format, sentence structure and diction. The teacher went around to each group to make sure they were staying on task and joined in the conversation. Then, they regrouped to identify the scene and situation where each genre artifact was used, focusing on setting, subject, writers, readers and purposes.

After this activity, the teacher reviewed the key points of classroom discussion with the class, and did a quick summary of the activity and its purpose. She also went through a review of how to define a discourse community. She detailed the components of the discourse community ethnography proposal and tasked students with answering questions about plans for their project with the following components: observing a shared activity, gathering genres and artifacts, and interviewing a member of the community. She asked for questions, but no students asked questions in front of the whole class. She gave them some classroom time to work on writing out their proposals – defining which discourse they planned to explore, who they would interview and what types of artifacts they could collect. The teacher roamed around the classroom as students worked on writing out their proposals. She answered questions students did not ask in front of the entire class.

Bringing the class back together, the teacher looked ahead at upcoming assignments, working toward completing this project and upcoming due dates. She also showed students where to locate required reading on the Desire to Learn website and explained how to do primary research. Students started to break off into their own private conversations during this last portion of class, but no one was disruptive to the entire classroom. As class wrapped up, a small line of students formed at the front of the classroom with last-minute questions. I moved up from the back of the class to thank the teacher for allowing me to observe her class.

There were a few key things I noticed during my observation that I would like to implement in my own classroom. The structure of the class was constantly moving. The teacher and students did not engage in one activity or mode of activity for longer than 15-20 minutes at a time. Although there were lecture portions of the class, they always felt very interactive. The teacher reached out to students with comparisons to things they understood, like the metaphor of high school cliques as discourse communities, and they were invited to participate in answering questions and joining the conversation. The teacher also incorporated short writing opportunities and group work and discussion. The students actively engaged in class material and participated.

Some of the challenges that I feel every teacher faces are how to keep students on task, particularly in small group work, and ensuring technology is an asset and not a distraction. I did see a bit of this in the classroom, possibly because I was sitting in the back of the class for the duration. I think one of the key ways the teacher dealt with these issues was constantly moving from one activity to the next and encouraging a variety of learning modes, from lecture to class discussion to group work to individual reflection. Incorporating all of these things into a single class really amazed me and the fact that she was able to keep students on task and not too distracted in the process.

Many of the methods we discussed in our Teaching Writing class within the Masters in Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse program, were used within this classroom. First of all, students were writing about writing concepts, specifically discourse communities and genre artifacts. Also, using multiple modes of teaching, ranging from lecture to classroom discussion to small group work to individual reflection, helps reach out to different learning methods, some of which are better at reaching some students than others. I feel that the incorporation of these two aspects help students come at learning the material from multiple directions.