Today's main focus was to shadow Gautam for the day, I wanted to see how his lessons were structured and what they contained. The timetables are structured so that the students focus on no more than three lessons per day, this makes for very effective learning because the students skills can be developed over shorter periods of time and I also think through this system students skills can be enhanced.
I decided that I wanted to observe a 6th grade lesson and as I already knew Anthony Conwright I thought this would be a great opportunity to see one of his lessons. I really wanted o observe how he managed his class, the classroom layout, and how that contributes to learning. The best thing I took from that lesson was the classroom layout. It was split into two sections, one part was lots of tables put together into a conference type situation, for half the class to sit with the teacher and advise each other. In the other half students sat at desks placed around the room working on laptops.
For the rest of the day I decided to shadow my host Gautam. During a multimedia lesson the teacher was going through how to use Adobe Illustrator and the aspects and details of that. In the class they were painting and editing animations they had drawn and scanned into the computer. We arrived at HTHMA and met up with Mr Corkish for his first day. We decided to show him around the campus to give him a feel for the school and to have a briefing about this week and what would be happening.
One personal question I had was I wanted to find out the similarities and differences between the music departments at SBL and HTH, so I went to High Tech High International and got involved with a music lesson. It was mainly the introduction to the lesson as it was the students first day back from internship. The teacher gave them a simple question and answer sheet about their favourite music, why they like it and do they play any instruments? This for me was my highlight of the day because seeing my common interest in a lesson in a different school was very insightful for me. After lunch we went and saw Brooklynn's Internship Presentation Of Learning, hearing her views on SBL and her insights was great to see and to see the impact both Andrea and her had on our school was nice. Shortly after myself and Mr Corkish went and sat with Anthony Conwright to ask some questions about the teaching side of PBL. This was great because it showed us all the work that goes on behind the scenes of the projects. We arrived at HTHMA and briefed with Mr Knowles about our day. As Max was going to deliver his iPOL we thought it would be a great idea to get the background information about POL (Presentation of Learning).
So went down to the 6th grade commons and interviewed two students with questions like; how often are they done? Who's the audience? And why do the students dress up for the POL's? After we gained all our information we went back and shared our findings with each other. We then went to watch Max's iPOL which I thought was seriously good, it was packed with content and was presented with extreme professionalism. We went straight into a project tuning programme where one of the teachers presented his project to the group and we would go through seven stages which were:
Shortly afterwards we were given some downtime to work on our presentations, we finalised everything and figured out what we were going to say. During our prep time a fire alarm went off in the building but it was just a false alarm so we were soon back to prep time. The presentation went smoothly and we finished it just inside the 3 minute requirement. We used the afternoon to do some observations in the middle schools to get a feel of what the process is like in the years before high school. I went down to Anthony Conwright's class again to observe his lesson and to gain more knowledge about how things are done at HTMMA. I also used the rest of the afternoon to plan a schedule for Friday and for the next week. I aim to do some more classroom observations and go and visit some different buildings around the campus. |