On my second visit to Ms. Leadbetter’s classroom, I was instructed to take on a more participatory role in class discussion. In that class discussion, students were tasked with answering prompted questions from Ms. Leadbetter regarding a section of a book they had just covered the class before. In this discussion, I was able to observe students working in small groups and attempting to answer the assigned working questions from Ms. Leadbetter. The problem I faced was that I had not been made aware of the book that was being covered in class, so my participation was limited to mentoring students in group discussion and covering thematic elements I picked up on from overhearing the group converse about issues the characters faced in the book. I took this class visit as an opportunity to analyze small group elements in a classroom environment. I realized that the initial motivation of students was relatively consistent through all of the groups, however, all of the groups at one point or another did run off course every now and again. Ms. Leadbetter would notice group discussion shifting towards Netflix shows or other non-academic work and quickly shift the class into an entire group discussion. Within this new discussion, she would reward those that had stayed on task by allowing group members to speak for their group to answer the assigned questions in front of the class.
Ms. Leadbetter’s ability to check the course of the class and make corrections as need be perfectly encapsulates Suzie Boss’s assessments of student learning. As Boss states in Chapter 5 of her Project Based Teaching, an authentic assessment is “more strategic about when, why, and how an assessment happens” (Boss 106). The quick checkups Ms. Leadbetter does on her students is a great tool to manage their attention and keep them engaged in their work, therefore mitigating most distractions. The other idea I picked up on from Ms. Leadbetter’s example in the classroom was her incorporation of checks at the end of her lesson plans. At the end of every chapter of the book Ms. Leadbetter’s class was reading, she would issue her students a checkup worksheet that asked students to summarize basic elements of the plot or character development pieces. However, she would give these questions to her students at the beginning of the chapter, directing her students to specific areas where they should focus as they read through the chapter. As Boss states in Project Based Learning, when an assessment is made at the end of a project, “students begin with a clear understanding of the project and how they will be assessed” (Boss 106). This will allow them to build their understanding of a text around the material that is most important.
