Last week I had my official first observation. I would say it went way better than I had hoped or expected, even if afterwards I feel slightly embarrassingly hypocritical with how well planned and staged my observation lesson was in relationship to my ordinary, clumsy lessons. Prior to my observation, we had watched about 40 minutes of the PBS Islam: Empire of Faith documentary to learn about the contrast between the West (Europe after the fall of Rome) and the East (Islam and the rise of Islamic culture and civilization). Following this viewing, I distributed to students 7 different brief articles on the various contributions of Islamic society made during this time like in education, medicine, paper & publishing, architecture, chemistry & astronomy, art, and mathematics. The day of the event, students quickly summarized the key points of their article in groups onto a large poster sheet of paper. Then we posted each sheet throughout the room. The students moved from station to station in groups quickly taking notes on each category in a graphic organizer. For homework, students were to rank each category of contribution to determine which they considered to be the most important in today's world, and write an essay on why they considered that the most important.
In my opinion, the lesson went off with only a few glitches. The students were eerily silent while moving from station to station. I think they were reacting to the fact that my Assistant Principal was there. Perhaps they were actually engaged in the activity. I know most students took good notes b/c I checked their organizers. The essays were lackluster. My students consistently disappoint me when it comes to writing substantiative essays. Their short paragraphs are typically robotic, forced, and oozing with grammatical and phrasing errors. Still, I have them write something almost every day.
The result: I probably won't be fired in this my first year of teaching. Also, I probably won't be put on a PIP (personal improvement plan), though I wonder how many first year teachers can even be put on one. I'm trying to make each day as thought out and well-executed as that one, but that is definitely an ongoing struggle.
