Clinical Observation #2

A much better week then last. The beginning of the week my supervising teacher was out for two days sick and there was a different substitute for each day. The other teacher didn’t seem to care much about what was going on and for the first few minutes of the period I was there, the students started to roll out the basketballs again. Like before, half the class headed for the bleachers to vegetate for the period. I had already purchased four hula hoops and a Frisbee over the weekend just for this moment. I asked to teacher if he minded if I tried something different besides basketball and he agreed. I zip tied the four hula hoops together in pairs and hung them from the basketball rims. I gave them directions for playing Frisbee hoops and explained the rules. My biggest concern here was that in the last week of activity, a large portion of the class had not participation in anyway. Most seemed bored, as I was myself watching a few of the boys throwing a ball at the rim. So I divided the class into two equal groups and put six from each side onto the floor to begin play. Every two minutes I blew my whistle and the first three in line on the sidelines would replace three players who were on the court for their respective teams. I personally went into the stands and started to persuade the normally inactive students to the sidelines and convinced them to enter the game. As the game went on those students, who at first took up one stationary position on the floor and didn’t want to move, soon found themselves actively participating as they ran down the Frisbee.
On that Wednesday my supervising teacher returned and we continued the FITNESSGRAM with the pacer run. Most of the kids were not excited about the aspect of running back and forth on the floor. I made it a point to turn it into a challenge and a competition between the students. I would challenge the girls to beat the boys and the boys to beat the best on the day. I walked the sidelines and the end lines giving encouragement and reminding the girls that the boys were there to beat them. I then would remind the boys that it was expected that they would always win their heats. As the girls pushed the boys I would make it a point to acknowledge that the girls in the group were destroying the boys. I would point out that the boys had their heads down and were slowing up and that the girls weren’t even winded. The boys would then pick it up and the girls would reciprocate and challenge the boys even harder. Of course I would then whisper that the one student on one end said that the other student on the other wouldn’t be able to keep up. This again spurred a greater sense of competition. We had some students who were extremely over weight and would not normally participate in any activity, let alone running. I would challenge them to finish at least five trips up and down and that I would be extremely impressed if they could do just that small amount. Of course I knew that the first ten trips would be at a pace that would allow a fast walk to keep up. Once they started and they realized they had made it five times, they each wanted to prove to me that they could do more then I expected of them. Not a one finished with less then twelve trips and for these students that was a major accomplishment. To me their accomplishments were equal in scale to those students who had done fifty and above, and I made sure that each of these students realized that. So I am all into Marzano’s “Reinforcing Effort” and the students are responding positively. I convince them they can and they surprise themselves by doing it. This week I can honestly say that the class is operating under Marzano’s “Nonlinguistic Representations” as an entire class as they are all over the gymnasium and moving. The last one of Marzano’s strategies is starting to take shape in the form of group encouragement for fellow classmates and that is “Cooperative Learning“.