My First Week Tutoring

[Anonymous]

I am working in two different settings at the Northfield High School. I started my time at the high school by going to the classroom where students complete online coursework to get back credit from classes that they failed. I am working one-on-one with a struggling high school senior to help complete credit recovery for three classes that he needs to graduate (World History, US History, and Economics). Northfield High School uses the program Oracle which consists of students reading passages followed by a short reading comprehension quiz. From my observations, many of the students skip the reading and look up the answers to the quiz online. The classroom had around 15 students and one teacher supervising. All of the students were working independently doing different courses on iPads and laptops. The teacher had a very good attitude and was very happy to help whenever people had questions, but the majority of the students did not ask for help during the time that I was there and seemed to be staying on task. The student that I was working with one-on-one is very beaten down and has very little confidence in his ability to learn and succeed. He has a “why does this matter” attitude and does not seem to be very optimistic about graduating high school. Because he is struggling with his current classes and trying to make up for the classes that he has previously failed, he spends 4 periods per day outside of a classroom either working one-on-one with someone or completing his recovery work. I think that this has been very hard for him socially and has made him feel singled out and not a part of the high school community. This relates to Piaget’s stages because he was clearly developing concerns about his identity and about how other people in his social group view him.

The other class that I am observing is a tenth-grade biology class. The class started with students briefly sharing what they did during the weekend. I thought that it was a good way to create an environment where students had a chance to share how they were doing on a more personal level. The students seemed like they were still having a hard time adjusting to being back in the classroom and they were not talking to each other before class started. They seemed to warm up to each other more when they were working in small groups in a lab where they swabbed different locations around the school to collect bacteria. The teacher did a really good job of giving a background on the experiment and was very good at asking questions to students to make sure that they were engaged, but he did not single anyone out in a way that would make them feel uncomfortable. He also seemed very passionate about the subject and told interesting but on-topic stories about his own life and experiences. I am interested to observe a more lecture-based class to see if his teaching style changes depending on the goals for the day.

Piaget’s stages suggest that all of these students would be in the formal operational stage of cognitive development. I saw strong examples of the stage characteristics exhibited by the students in the biology class. All of the students were thinking scientifically about the task and were thinking in terms of hypotheticals by considering what they knew about surfaces that they knew to be dirty. They also approached the problem in a systematic way making sure to go to different locations where they thought they would find different types of bacteria. Overall, my observations seemed to fit Piaget’s states. I am looking forward to seeing how my impressions change of both the biology classroom and my one-on-one work with the student throughout the semester.

• This topic was modified 2 years, 9 months ago by Tonja Clay.

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