Group observation findings by Claudia. I think we all did our best in our write ups. I will be commenting in this blog about what I noticed about some of the write up and what I would have said to you if I was Marilyn Havlik, and this was what you presented me with in the post-conference. So far I only had a chance to read through the first 44 pages of the 102 pages in the document. I was impressed with many of them in terms of how some decided to include things that I did not. For example observer # 6 was more clear in the summary of the observation, this style identifies with my style of summarizing things. Observer # 4 I liked how this observer described what the teacher was wearing (white lab coat), I thought that was important because not many science teachers wear a lab coat in a simulated activity. Another thing, some of you mentioned the mating activity and how the teacher instructed students to mate, just as a thought you might want to mention that it was a simulated mating activity and that it would be done through the use of index cards placed on the gene pool (Just for clarification to readers that might not know what the lesson entailed). Observer #2 way too brief on your complete and accurate summary of the lesson. Also, how can you make the claim that effective teachers vary questioning techniques when in your evidence you say that out of 16 questions you observed 12 that were low level. Which ones were the low level and where is the data to see how many times I asked the same questions? I did not see it on the observation data- you just say that the questions asked were questions such as who, what, where, when, why, and is type of questions, well as the teacher I will ask show me how many times I asked this type of question? Observer #4 you could have strengthen your evidence by stating in your observation of the lesson what gender was the student who asked the question - because you said "a student then asked is this survival of the fetus?" Observer #5 made the claim that effective teachers ask questions in order for students to gain knowledge {according to whom?}
Then in your evidence for this claim you say that teacher asked four questions and then after each mating activity her questions were directed to males and females and she wasn't favoring any particular group of students. First if you are going to make this claim that effective teachers ask questions in order to gain knowledge the evidence must be related to how or what did you observed that showed that the questions gave knowledge- such as the students responded appropriately or something to that extend. Then you follow that evidence up with she did not favor males over females- I did not see any data in the summary of the observation that would support that. I actually found that Marilyn Havlik directed questions to boys by their names. Hence, I did find that most of us agreed on the fact that we will use a non-directive approach for this teacher. Also some of the claims seemed to correlate among us. One more thing- this question is actually directed for Mike, I noticed in some that people wrote what type of approach they will use with this teacher in the pre-observation conference with out having yet observed her. Is an observer able to tell from the pre-observation conference what type of approach they would take? Please elaborate or direct me to where I can find the answer?
[to all, have a great summer]

Final Blog:

Thank you all for a great class! I know that I will use what I have learned in this class a lot this year and in the future. I have enjoyed getting to know you all and listening to your ideas in class. Hopefully I will see some of you in future classes and for those of you who have finished, congratulations!

Comments on Marzano:I enjoyed all of the presentations. I plan on keeping your handouts and referring to them in the future. It is very interesting to see the effect sizes. Specifically, I think in Doug’s group they talked about the negative effect of homogenous grouping. In my district a lot of parents really push for homogenous groups every time the class is grouped. I definitely vary the types of groupings that I use so I appreciate having this data. As I reflected on Marzano’s book, I use a lot of these techniques already, but based on what I learned in class I know there will be ways to modify or change them to possibly improve student learning and achievement. Also, it is great to have data to back up why we do what we do in classrooms. This year I will be mentoring a teacher and I know this will be a nice text to refer to.

I hope you all enjoy the rest of the summer!
~Rebekah

What an informative and useful class. Even though this is only my fourth class, I feel that I am walking away with a variety of different tools and overall knowledge. Honestly, what it takes to be an educational leader is more than I originally perceived. However, I am pleasantly surprised that all the qualities and strategies needed to be an effective administrator are not that far-fetched and quite attainable. Knowing the qualities of effective teachers, instructional strategies, different personality types, and the complete observation process are now areas where I feel competent and can now build upon them to turn them into strengths. The class discussions in this class were interesting and it was great to get to know people with different educational experiences. I wish all of you the best of luck as you embark or for some of you, end your educational journey. I know we will all make successful educational leaders. Enjoy the rest of your summer.
Meredith

Thanks for a great class. I am taking away many strategies for me to begin building upon. This last week has been crazy, but we all made it. I enjoyed sharing expereinces and interacting with all of you and I wish you all the best. Good Luck finishing up your final and keep practicing those observation techniques. I'm off to L.A. very soon; if you ever are in town or need to talk school, please contact me (mrbecker21@hotmail.com)! Thanks again, Dave

As I am finishing this class and also my requirements for the type 75 certification, I am thinking about how to sum things up. The following pops into my head:
I am left feeling transformed and confident about my role as an educational leader. The program at DePaul, culminating with this class on supervision, has given me the insight, tools, and mindset to be a successful school leader. As I exit, here are a few take home nuggets that will stay with me.

Have vision, will travel
Know what is effective teaching
Know how to communicate with people
Try to be as democratic as possible
Be a leader
Listen
Respect
Analyze and incorporate research and data
Realize the importance of what you do
Enjoy every day-What we do is a priviledge, an honor, and much fun.

You are a great group of people.
Have a great summer.

Barry Rodgers

A day later...

This class helped me realize exactly who I am as a teacher and person. Being a protector guardian has helped me understand that I am very structured and traditional. I like to think I am flexible when it comes to teaching styles, but I am truly one for understanding knowledge. That is what I want my kids to know as well: knowledge. For me, that was the best part of class.

The books were great in understanding the different styles of teaching and different ways we learn. I really enjoyed Pajak's book and the 4MAT model from www.aboutlearning.com. I feel I can learn more about my students and the people I work with in my organizations. Being a curriculum studies major, I can see how to apply these concepts in my line of work. Also, if you haven't seen the movie Pay It Forward, go see it! It is a great movie.

It was great meeting everyone in class. Thanks to everyone who has helped me in my difficult moments. I have another class I am taking within these five weeks, and I have to do some more work right now. Please have a wonderful summer. Take some time for yourself. Congratulations to everyone graduating this summer. If you see me around campus, give this brother a shoutout! One.

I just want to say good luck to everyone. It has truly been a great class and I enjoyed meeting all of you. I feel that we really learned alot from each other that I will take with me in my career. This was my last class for my masters and I really felt like I learned alot about what it takes to be an administrator. I was able to find my strengths and weaknesses and really was able to get the bigger picture of what it feels like to be in an administrators shoes. It is a tough job but somebody's gotta do it. :) This class really made me feel more confident about myself as an educator. I learned how to deal with different types of personalities and am able to understand and respect that people have different perspectives on education. As an administrator I learned that you really need to be aware of alot of things while going through the stages of observation. I thought the books that we read in this class were very beneficial and I will definetly be referring to them down the road.

Thanks everyone for a great class. I know that you will all be successful administrators or what ever else you are going to go into. I look forward to working with all of you somewhere down the road. Take Care!! :0)

Everyone have a great summer! Some of you I would still see next quarter. For those who are graduating or completing their studies, congrats!!!
I have learned so much in these ten sessions that I would have ever imagined this course to be so informational and interactive. I appreciate everyone's interest and enthusiam in cooperating to make this a great summer session. Stronge, Pajak, Glickman, and Marzano will be referred to as often as I need to and recommended to those who will benefit from the books. Overall, I would just like to express that I feel I am leaving this course with information that will be useful not just for when I become a principal but right now as a teacher........

Instructional Strategies Presentation

I have to say that it was actually interesting to listen to 3 hours of presentations! Everyone did such a great job! I think the strategies presented reaffirmed some of my own beliefs and what I have been taught in professional development workshops at the school where I teach. Also, I think the presentations also reminded and gave me new insights of things I should be doing with my students next year. I think sometimes I fail to give my students adequate feedback on their lab reports, tests, and etc.... When I have over 100 of the same thing to grade, it gets a bit tiresome. However, I think the research presented showed that this is one area that I do need to put more effort into. Also, I think I could work with my students more to develop nonlinguistic representations and summarizing skills... My h.s. students struggle to make meaning and summarize in their in own words text that is heavily content-oriented. And after listening to students' frequent complaints about homework, the research that provided the recommended minutes of hw per day for h.s. students, tells me that I must be doing something right. At any rate, I think the presentations demonstrated the importance of research and how it should influence our practice as teachers.

One more class to go!

wow the last day of class for us. I'm really excited to be finishing it up and I'm glad for meeting all of you. I re-read stronge and what it takes to be an effective teacher. The one area that I need help in most is being able to have a reflective view upon my teaching. Stronge writes in his checklist on reflective practice that effective teachers: 1. know areas or personal strengths and weaknesses 2. uses reflection to improve teaching 3. sets high expectations for pesonal classroom performance and 4. demonstrates high efficacy. These are are areas that I could personally work on and hope to improve. Its helpful to be able to look at my teaching and look at my strengths and improve on my weaknesses. Those were just some random thoughts of my day. See you all very soon.

Hi! A round of applause to everyone...the presentations were great! Sirlester, you are very funny (and I like to eat eggs for breakfast, too), Mr. Becker, thank you for the crayons and April, I wish you had been my chemistry teacher in high school! The final blog tonight...the final final tomorrow...what can I say? This was the first of the supervision classes for me and I learned a lot...some of it new and some of it just a deeper reflection on things I think I already knew but needed to think more about. I'll keep Pajak and Glickman on my shelf for sure. In the fall I'll be starting my third year of classes here at DePaul (I'm on the slow path, 1 class at a time) and the thing that stands out in my mind each quarter is always the people I meet in each class...how impressed I am by the community of educators DePaul draws...how everyone has such great ideas and is so resourceful and motivated to bring the best to their students...some weekends I could really do without the homework, but when you think about it, it really is pretty cool. Not to sound like a total dork, but it makes me a little sad to say g'bye...so...I wish you guys who are finished all the best in your supervision endeavors and I hope to see the rest of you in other classes. Take care and enjoy the rest of the summer.
Donna

I think that today was an extremely fun class. It was interesting to see how everyone brought a different prospective to the table. I think everyone did a great job presenting there research and I learned a great deal about what Marzano was actually talking about. I'm a little nervous about the final on Thursday. I feel like I've grown a lot in this class and I've written a lot about the personal reflection that it has brought me. I feel confident in the write ups and the pre-observation questions and all but I'm hoping I am able to catch and record enough data through the observation. I just keep telling myself the more that I practice the better that I will eventually become at a supervisor job. This class has definitely taught me how to prepare, organize and strive for student achievement. This is my first class at Depaul and I hope that I learn just as much in my others as I have learned in this one.

First of all I want to say that everyone's presentations provided me with a lot of knowledge. I would of probably had finished reading Marzano, but this way was better. I enjoyed the interaction and the feedback. I feel that I now can carry more intelligent conversations with my boss besides the sports he talks about as he walks (supervises) the hallways. I am looking forward to returning (believe it or not) in September and present my team with research based strategies. My favorite was the one Jessica and I worked on. The homework, and Practice research made sense, and I just wished that more teachers would be reading on this because it is true that some teachers leave a lot of homework. They have good intentions, but fail to realize that parents should be kept to a minimal even not be involve at all in helping. The involvement should remain to asking and checking that their child did their homework. Looking forward to Thursday, so I can finally take a break!!!

I just want to give everyone a high five for a job well done. I thought the presentations were innovative and fun. I can't believe we are already approaching the last day of class and the final day of grad school for myself. These two years flew by, and I have to say this class has given me so much insight of the teaching profession. It's a tough job and it seems that all of you are great teachers. Your students are very fortunate. I may be reconsidering my profession later down the road. I love my job, but I think teaching would be great in the future. See you all thursday!

Thoughts on Data Collection:

As we have sat and watched the videos in class, I am consistently overwhelmed as I try to capture everything that is going on in a classroom. There is just so much to watch for! As we compared notes, I was impressed by the different data that all of us had collected. It seems that no two people collect the same data. As I noticed how different our data was, I realized how hard it must be to observe a classroom if you don’t do a pre-conference. Each of us selected slightly different methods of data collection and focused on slightly different areas. This really reinforced to me how important the pre-conference is so that the teacher and supervisor can agree on an area to be observed. If not, it seems like it would be common for a teacher to feel that a supervisor had focused on the “wrong” area and had not noticed what he considered important or necessary. At the post-conference, I think there could be a lot of communication problems if the teacher and supervisor had focused on different areas. Of course if there was an area of concern the supervisor could select to watch for that area as well, but at least they would have one area that they had both decided upon. However, I also wonder if it wouldn’t sometimes be intellectually interesting to have one or two people collect data without a pre-conference to see what area they focused on. This might lead to some interesting discussions and discoveries about someone’s practice. However, the teacher would have to feel very comfortable with the supervisors/observers in order to embrace this idea.

Another thought: While doing my undergrad at Northwestern, we did a lot of videotaping. I really found it very useful for myself as the teacher and I know my supervisors also used the tapes. As I watch these tapes of classrooms I am reminded of the benefits of videotaping. Teachers can go back and analyze the tapes, you can do multiple types of data collection, small groups of teachers can reflect together, peer coaches can use tapes, etc! As an administrator/supervisor I would really like to encourage the staff to use videotaping. If you think about it, a lot of professions already use videotaping and I think it could really help improve reflective practices in education.

See you all soon!~Rebekah