Northfield Middle School Observing

[Anonymous]

Earlier today I made my first visit to Northfield Middle School to observe Ms. Bloom’s 6th grade English class. The class started with all the students independently completing a short review quiz on their iPads. Then Ms. Bloom shared a video of the poet Amanda Gorman, who became famous for speaking at Joe Biden’s inauguration, reciting a poem on the silver lining of the COVID pandemic and how these challenging times are bringing people closer together. This was part of her poem-of-the-day activity, which I thought was a wonderful way to incorporate poetry regularly into the classroom. The students then had to chance to discuss the poem with one or two partners. The students astutely noted that the poem’s use of occasionally rhyming in an inconsistent scheme made the moments when words did rhyme more striking.

The Entrance to Northfield Middle School

This was the first day of a unit on argumentative writing. The class has already covered informative and narrative writing, and now are discussing the characteristics of strong persuasive writing. Ms. Bloom started with an activity where the students worked with their partners to verbally convince the other that either cats or dogs were better. This sparked some passionate debate while illustrating some of the techniques people use to make good arguments, such as addressing the opposing side’s position and highlighting its flaws. Next, the students worked alone on their iPads to read a few argumentative articles that Ms. Bloom had selected, and she asked the class to point out some common characteristics in these articles; the students mentioned things such as the immediate statement of a strong claim and the use of facts and expert opinions to support this claim.

In terms of general observations, Ms. Bloom struck me as a very well-spoken and engaging teacher, who did well to accept and build upon student responses to questions. The class is primarily focused on learning to analyze and practice a variety of different writing styles that will be important in future academic work. The students were well behaved and focused. They have a lot of organizational supports such as a notebook with a set table of contents where they paste in worksheets and notes and a checklist of required activities. I was struck by the frequent use of iPads within the classroom, which I recognize is practical and eliminates the need for printing, but it still felt kind of sad to watch a room full of students, sitting at their desks and staring silently at their respective screens. The students are predominantly white, with a number who appeared Hispanic. The classroom itself had the typical depressing institutional atmosphere I associate with public schools, with cold linoleum floors and concrete walls.

The students in my classroom are in the 6th grade, meaning that they are roughly 11 to 12 years old. This places them at the transition between the concrete operational and the formal operational stages. According to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, children in the concrete observational stage are logical and organized thinkers, but they require concrete evidence and examples. In contrast, children who are at the formal operational stage are able to think abstractly and solve hypothetical problems. I only got to observe briefly so I did not get a strong picture of where the students fit into these stages. There was one instance where Ms. Bloom asked the children something along the lines of “if the author [who was anti-Pluto] were to introduce evidence supporting the idea that Pluto actually was a planet, would this still be a good example of argumentative writing?” While it was a fairly leading question, that students were able to consider this hypothetical case and to conclude that this would no longer be a strong argument, indicating that they have some formal operational characteristics.

Ms. Bloom

Overall I enjoyed getting the opportunity to observe in Ms. Bloom’s classroom and I am excited to be more involved in tutoring the students in the future. I am trying to decide if I want to become a teacher myself (likely of middle or high school history), so this class provides me with a valuable opportunity to see what teaching might be like in practice. I think that Piaget’s stages of cognitive development appear to hold true with respect to the students I observed. While his theory may have its critics and limitations, I think that it does a fairly good job of explaining how children of different ages think and learn.

• This topic was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Tonja Clay.

[Author]

Posts