Week 2 Field Focused Observation: HLPs

 Nicole Tate

Date of field experience: January 29-Feb 2

Yorktown Middle School - ELA 8th Grade - 2nd and 3rd period

Overall, my host teacher does a great job of incorporating all kinds of HLPs when she teaches. Like I talked about in last week's blog post, she genuinely cares so much about learning about students (ex: asking how their sports are going or how their siblings are doing). She has implemented organizational routines such as students knowing how to sign out to use the bathroom/checkout a pencil and how they have a daily routine of starting with their bellringer and looking up at the board for instructions. One thing she has talked to me about a lot already is how even though she is teaching ELA 8 all day long, her teaching methods change from period to period (HLP- coordinating and adjusting instruction). I am glad that I get to see two different periods because this has already been apparent to me. She also seems to do very well accommodating to each student's needs, including official ones documented on IEPs and 504, but also from observed behavior (example: having paper copies for students who don't do well on computers, allowing students to work at a standing desk if they are antsy). 

This week, students were mainly preparing for their vocab test on Friday and writing their first drafts of their Integrity Essays, so there were not a lot of discussions or small group work happening for me to observe. To go off of the HLP "Analyzing instruction for the purpose of improving it", one thing that my host teacher changed this week was the way she grades bellringers and vocab. She only grades one day of the bellringer corrections per week, and the rest of the days are for completion. Students have been really struggling with the grammar corrections this semester, so she started writing on the board how many corrections were in each line of the paragraph. Students said this really helped them throughout the week, so at the end of the week had me write on the paper before making copies the numbers down the margin. She also is great at providing feedback to students on their outlines. She grades everything super quick so students constantly know how they are performing. One thing she did that really stood out to me was having students who earned either a 4/5 or 5/5 on their thesis statements move on to write their outlines, where as students who earned a 3/5 or lower had to come see her before they could move on. On Friday, my host teacher was out at a funeral so we had a sub. This day they were taking their vocab test, and both of my periods did surprisingly well with the sub. During this time my host teacher had me grading bellringers, which I honestly really enjoyed being able to help her with since she was spending her weekend having the funeral services.

Check in:

So, I dropped the class for my minor that I was talking about last week. Besides that freeing up a few hours of my week, this week was still insanely busy. I have had dance rehearsals every single day, including weekends. Moving forward, I want to work on more intentionally planning out my time, especially for my asynchronous classes. This is the first semester I have had a consistent start time each day because of EDJH, which I think has helped my sleep schedule (even though I have been sleeping less this semester). I am feeling much better this week about avoiding more burnout than I have to this semester.