The New York State DOE requires 100 hours of classroom observation before teacher candidates begin their student teaching. To help you meet this requirement, these hours have been divided between different SOE education courses. Ten (10) hours of classroom observation in a school setting have been attached to this course. In addition, this assignment is meant to improve candidates reflective observation skills by relating the observed classroom activities to the concepts and strategies addressed in this course. Candidates will submit a paper based on their classroom observation and include an elaborate interpretation using ideas from the course readings and discussions.
Due to the COVID situation, the classroom observation requirement has to be met by viewing and analyzing relevant video materials.
Summary of the assignment: Find and analyze a video material focusing on two major aspects:
1. Childrens classroom activities. 2. Teachers classroom strategies.
You can either analyze two different videos, each of which focusing on one of these two aspects, or use just one video material that combines both aspects but allows to discuss each of them separately. I am not assigning any particular video materials; the choice of videos is up to you: The idea is not to prescribe and impose the content on you but rather let you choose and analyze
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a material related to the subject area and grade level you are most interested in teaching. You can use any valid resource with relevant videos, from ATLAS and Teaching Channel to particular state DOE educational video resources or YouTube. The length of the videos must be sufficient to allow for a detailed description and substantive analysis of childrens activities and teacher strategies.
Therefore, the classroom observation paper must consist of two major parts: I. Childrens activities:
1. Watch an educational or developmental-psychological video material focusing on a child or a group of children engaged in one of classroom activities:
1) Solving a problem individually or in group;
2) Interacting with each other or/and with a teacher individually or as a group/class; 3) Being engaged in any other academically relevant activity.
2. Describe what the child/children were doing in most possible detail.
3. Analyze (explain, conceptualize) what you observed by connecting it to one or several relevant psychological-developmental concepts described in the course materials and/or discussed in class for example, related to certain developmental periods of intelligence/memory/attention development, or cognitive processing, language development, development of social-cognitive skills, etc., depending on the age of the children and on what they were doing and how. In other words, make conceptual sense of the observed situation(s).
This part of your observation paper must consist of two roughly equal sections (observational and analytical) with a total minimum length of 600 (six hundred) words.
II. Teacher strategies:
1. Watch an educational video focusing on a teacher or teachers in an educational setting (early childhood or childhood) who teach a lesson in a certain area literacy/ELL, mathematics, social sciences, or any other area that is close to your own interests.
2. Describe what the teachers were doing during the lesson in most possible detail.
3. Analyze (explain, conceptualize) what you observed by connecting it to one or several recommended teaching strategies described in the course materials and/or discussed in class related to teaching children in a certain area, depending on the content of the observed lesson. In other words, similar to the first part of the assignment, make conceptual sense of the observed teaching strategies and methods.
This part of your paper must also consist of two roughly equal sections (observation and analysis) with a total minimum length of 600 words.
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10 Therefore, the total minimum length of your classroom observation paper must be 1200 words.
Upload your observation paper to Blackboard using the link provided for this assignment (in the Assignments section of the course). Include in your file all links and full references to the analyzed video materials.
