Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to observe a 12th grade English class. Before diving deep into how the students engaged with the material the teacher taught, I want to make clear my role in the classroom, as well as the purpose of the class. My role in the classroom was to purely observe. However, if there were chances to join into a small group discussion, I would interact with the students. The purpose of their class was to prepare and guide them through college-level work. This is under the assumption that all of the students in the class have plans to attend a higher education university, which it seemed most everybody did. Prior to entering the classroom setting, I thought about some potential challenges that a teacher may face. I thought about Larmer and Boss’ 7 Essential Project Design Elements, student voice and choice in particular (Boss 3).  As I observed, I paid close attention to whether or not students were allowed to verbally participate in the class, or if it was more like a lecture to the students. Much to my pleasure, the teacher exercised a style in which she gave the students a choice of whether or not they wanted to work in groups, or individually on a set of questions based on a reading they did. At first the students were very quiet and seemed a bit disengaged, but then the teacher involved herself as if she was one of the students and the small and individual groups slowly converted to an ongoing class discussion. I had no doubt that the students were given a voice and choice of how they wanted to work, however not many of the students opted to use the voice and choice available to them, so the teacher had to implement a natural adjustment based on the environment of the classroom. She also allowed the students to make connections from their work to their personal lives without letting the discussion become too off task i.e., there was a few moments where many of the students, as well as the teacher, began relating characters in the story to people in the newly released Jeffrey Dahmer documentary on Netflix. In some sense, that also builds a comfortable culture among the students and teacher, however it allows their relationship to remain professional. Building culture in a classroom is another important factor in Project Based Teaching that was discussed by Boss and Larmer (16).

Overall, I thought the teacher did an amazing job of keeping the class engaged and involved with the subject material. She was able to adapt her teaching style to the needs of the classroom, which may prove to be one of the most overlooked elements of teaching: being adaptable.