Jessica Bowlby

5 March 2018

ARTEDUC 4300

Mr. McGuire

Observation 3

In the day that I observed for teaching strategies I noticed that the teacher used

presenting, discussion, questioning, and guided discovery. He would present them with certain

information at the beginning of class while he was doing the announcements and introduction for

the day. He would tell them what they would be doing, how, and when. He also used discussion

as a form of teaching. He would talk with the class and allow them to discuss the topic with him

before getting started on the project for the day. On this particular day of observations, I was also

working on the second observation form pertaining to questioning so it was easy to relate that

observation information to the questioning teaching strategy. The teacher uses questioning quite

a lot in his teaching. He introduces a topic and then asks the students questions about the project.

He asks them about techniques, steps, and tools. I also noticed that guided discovery was used in

this classroom. The teacher allowed for his projects to be somewhat open and choice based. As

long as the requirements are met, students can work on the project in whatever way they feel

necessary which allows for discoveries to be made by the students.

The teacher would change his teaching slightly depending on the behavior of each class,

but the timing was very similar for each class. The better-behaved classes were asked more

questions during the demonstration and were allowed to participate and interact with the teacher
more. The worse behaved classes got more direct instruction and less questioning. This kept the

class quieter during the demonstration and announcements.

I was able to see the same lessons multiple times throughout the day and noticed how

they were taught to each class. Seating and noise control varies depending on class behavior.

Some classes got more of an opportunity to interact with the teacher during the demonstration

while other were meant to sit quietly and listen. The teacher used more of the questioning

teaching strategy with the better-behaved classes because they would not get too out of hand

when given the opportunity to speak during the demonstration. Also, according to James Borich,

the better-behaved classes were shown more enthusiasm and animation during instruction. This

goes along with the fact that they were also asked more questions while the other classes were

expected to sit quietly. Aside from this, the classes were taught in almost the exact same time

intervals. Both the sixth graders and eighth graders got about five minutes of announcements and

then about five to ten minutes of demonstration. The rest of the class was used for work time and

each class had approximately two to four minutes of clean up since they were not working with

any messy materials.