Observation #2

I did my 10 hours observation at Learning for Leadership Charter school, and I observed it with ESL teacher Ms. Zahra who’s more like a friend to me than a teacher. Zahra mostly works with elementary and middle school English learners Students, and from what I’ve seen half of her students don’t speak English yet, and her work is to help them to not get lost in their classes, and understand their lessons.

Context: help students with reading, writing, math, and communications.

My role in the class: Mondays: from 9-11 I help Zahra teach Capitalization to some middle school and elementary students, each students has a stack of papers practice writing and the one who finish the most at the end of the period gets a new pencil. Or sometimes they would write short stories to learn how to capitalize, I just walk around helping students, correct them, and watch them behave.

Tuesdays:  I help Zahra with 4^th graders who come to learn how to read, I read with them their class readings now they are reading Amber Brown ready, and explain it with kid’s friendly language to which it’s still hard for some of them to understand me. To those who are little better they read with them, while Zahra reads with the once that poorly in need of learning how to read, she teaches them how to pronounce every and each word in the story and its meaning.

Wednesdays: my favorite day where I get to have communication chats with the four graders about their readings and look at their understanding of what’s going on the story. I facilitate the group and everyone takes turn to share their opinion, and whoever doesn’t feel like sharing has to write down a reflection about the reading.

Thursdays & Fridays: Math days where students build their math skills. Elementary students come with their math sheets from their classes, and me and Zahra and Najma would help them to do them in class, or else they would do it by themselves we will have to check their work after they are done. Middle schooler log in to Khan Academy to their math work. I would walk around help students who are struggling with question.

Educational philosophy:

Ms. Zahra’s education philosophy is essentialism and its shown by the way she pushes each one of her students to think for themselves first. While the school is based on project based and they encourage to work together as a group, Ms. Zahra helps her students to think as an individual, guide them to do better as an individual and become independent through self-discipline. Ms. Zahra might not have lots of options to be creative and give students choice to explore more because most of her work is to help her students with do the works that they have from their other classes, but she sure push her students forward. While doing some of the readings if she notices that some of her students don’t need help reading she gives them another book that will take them to another level of reading. She gives awards regularly to those who push themselves in the class to help them become more independent and self-discipline. Ms. Zahra have good one on once relationship with her students, some of the times the times you notice that by the way her students open up to her and talk about what’s hard for them, and what they need help with. She works with her student’s teachers too to provide the needs the students need to learn better.

Ms. Zahra is a good teacher, but I wonder most of the times why doesn’t she create her own lessons where she can teach what she wants to teach, instead of just helping the students with their class works that they come with? What other ways can she help students to learn more English?