Tyler Lee CO#2

My second class observation was Sana McHarek's 3C Reading class. Before class started, Sana made sure to engage individual students and show interest in how they were doing in their other classes and what they were doing in their free time.  It's obvious that she has a very good report with her students.

Sana was very organized and methodical and at the very beginning of class she gave an overview of what activities and material the class was to cover in the following 50 minutes (a timed reading, a paraphrasing activity, and an extensive reading activity from a novel), and she explained what the activity was intended for (in this case, improving fluency). I learned a lot about her teaching style just from this observation, as it showed me that when the class understands what to expect, it seems that they are more able to focus and are less surprised when the class moves to a new activity.

When the class was opened up for discussing the comprehensive questions that were paired with the timed reading activity, I also noticed that she had each student make their own answer card (a folded piece of paper with A, B, C, and D written on each face) that allowed everyone to show her what their answer to a given question. I observed that this is a very useful method of assessing the entire class at once. When an answer was unanimous, Sana still made sure to ask a student to explain why the answer was correct, citing content from the passage, and when a multiple choice answer seemed ambiguous, she would guide the class through each possibility until they arrived at the correct answer. Because many of the answers to these questions proved to be ambiguous, the activity took longer than anticipated and only allowed for the paraphrasing activity afterwards. This allowed me to recognize that as a teacher, you have to be able to improvise and accept that plans may have to change depending on the students' needs.