Fourth and FINAL Observation!

I had my last observation this past Thursday! Finally, Dr. Shannon came to observe a period that is fairly well-behaved and rather academic. I'm not going to lie here, they're pretty much my favorite class.  The period started off pretty well...so far as I saw it, the students didn't really seem to mind Dr. Shannon's presence in the room, and they did not act any differently than they would have if she had not been there. I got the students settled down a bit and instructed them to pull out their TKAM books and reader response journals from the night before. I instructed them to split up into pairs and compare/discuss what they had written in their RRJs. After a  few minutes, I instructed them to select one passage and develop one question they had about the chapters they had read the night before. Once they had done this, I put polleverywhere.com on the screen and directed the pairs to submit one question and one passage. They were also to attach their name to the text. We used their text submissions as a structure for our class discussion that day.

The discussion was incredibly successful. The students were very opinionated on the details of the upcoming trial in the novel and Atticus's involvement/motives/intentions as lawyer for the black defendant. The students were active and engaged throughout the entire period. Though, many reminders were needed for students to raise hands and not talk over one another.

I'd say the only downfall, if you can call it that, of this lesson was that the students were so engaged and fired up about one question, that we spent the entire class discussing it. We were not able to get to any summarization activity. I'm more than okay with that though. And now, I await Dr. Shannon's post observation conference.