Context for Learning Assignment

 

Context For Learning

My placement for secondary education is at  High School, located in Mead, WA. This is a mostly rural school, however, there are many multifamily neighborhoods (suburban) in the district as well. My cooperating teacher  has been teaching for 20 years, mostly at  Colfax, WA. All 5 periods of this class are general education classes, except, he requests students for his classes that are struggling with school. These students are not quite resource room students, they just need a different perspective on learning. He has a "free flowing" classroom management style with his students. During my observations to this point, it seems to be effective, but there are often conflicting directions with the usage of cell phones in the classrooms. He allows the student to listen to music on their phones, but students quickly take advantage of this and start texting.

There is minimal use of a textbook in the classroom. The literature classes are reading, NIGHT by Elie Wiesel- a Holocaust survivor from the Second World War. This book seems to be engaging for the students. The History classes have just started working on their CBA's (Curriculum based Assessments) Students are researching in the library on the assigned current event topics and will ultimately write a 6 page paper on their findings.

I am teaching 3 period of English/Literature and 2 periods of History on Mondays and Tuesdays. Each class period is 50 minutes in length with one prep period that falls on the first period time slot. All students are pretty well grouped together as far as learning is concerned. Each of the students are struggling with school in some form or another, and just need extra assistance to get them to think differently with learning. The Avervision is used primarily with a document camera to display documents and videos for the students.

My second period English class has all 10th grade students in it. There are 32 students in this particular class. it is rather large compared to the rest of the class periods. There are 25 males and 7 females in the class. There are 2 ELL students. There are no students with IEP's or gifted students. There are no students with a 504 plan.