Observation B

1. Classroom Overview
The Learning Situation
This recording will take place at Crowley Ninth Grade Campus in Crowley, TX. Students in the class
are in their first Spanish class (though some have taken an exploratory language class in which they were
introduced to some Spanish). Though, students proficiency levels vary as there are some with a bit of
Spanish exposure and some with almost no exposure. I have a native speaker in all of my classes except this
one. All students are in the ninth grade (14-15 years old). This particular class is the first class of the morning
and is particularly small compared to my other sections of the same course. The class will last 56 minutes, but
that includes 6-10 minutes for school-wide announcements. The students have responded fairly well overall to
the course. For sure, all students in the class are in the Novice range on the ACTFL proficiency scale, most of
which fall within Novice-Low, with none being higher than Novice-Mid. The recording of this class session
takes place on the first day of the ninth week of the school year. This week is the third week in the unit titled
Qu es un heroe?. Therefore, students are accustomed to classroom procedures, etc. This learning
session follows the 5E learning model, per requirements of my campus administration. 5E is a lesson cycle
that follows the steps Engagement, Exploration, Explanation, Elaboration, and Evaluation (For more details,
please see the Midwestern State University 5E Learning Cycle page

Class Session Objective
In this class session, the official objectives are stated in terms of what a student can say that they can
do with the language. They are I can understand some basic personal information found in short readings.
and I can describe someone elses age, personality, and physical characteristics. Today and tomorrow
students are being assessed in the presentational mode of communication. The goal is to have students
create a short comic. similar to one that we will read in class. After reading the comic and answering some
essential questions, the class will make a short comic together to demonstrate the process. While the
interpretive mode is not being assessed today, it is essential to the presentational portion of the assignment
since students need to understand the comic in order to be able to create a similar one. Students will be
expected to have a set of questions answered regarding their comic along with some of the text written in
Spanish. The next day, students will finish creating their comic and turn it in.

While this is not considered a true assessment grade, this is the first time they will be expected to
produce something using presentational communication. Although my plan at the beginning of the year was to
attempt to assess each mode of communication every unit/grading period, I have found that it would be too
burdensome to do so. Instead, I plan to make interpretive assessments regular and alternate between
interpersonal and presentational from unit to unit. This activity is leading up to students creating a short book
describing themselves and their heroes that will be for the presentational assessment grade. I feel that this
activity will give students a bit of practice with the process before actually doing the book.

Outline of Class Activities
1. Entrada - Students enter the class every day and begin working on the Entrada or bellwork. Today, I
am introducing them to this short comic and worksheet (created by Zachary Jones). While they will
primarily be focusing on reading and understanding, I will change a few of the questions to better match
the curriculum covered thus far that students can more easily answer. They will answer the questions:
a. Cmo es tu monstruo?
b. De dnde es?
c. Qu le gusta?
d. Qu come (eat)?
Mi monstruo come

2. After the Entrada, the class will break into groups to discuss what makes the comic funny (or
supposedly funny). Students will be asked to use the following when sharing.
a. Es cmica porque
b. Es irnica porque
c. Al monstruo le gusta

3. As a whole, students will share the observations they had. Then, we will briefly discuss the type of
irony that appears in the comic (a topic being covered in their English classes currently).

4. As a class, we will create a comic that incorporates our monsters and a piece of irony.

5. Students will then begin to write a brief summary of their scene in English. They should finish this
before leaving. Students will complete their short comic strip the next class period.

Statement of Plan to Address Observation Requirements
For this observation I plan to have two specific tables in closer focus. In the last observation I noticed
that one table is by far more willing to self-initiate while the other is not. I plan to use one student from each
group as a point for comparison during this observation. While observing, I also hope to zoom in on my tablet
video while observing the video to isolate the recording of just those students when evaluating their Time on
Task. One thing I am interested in is if I should consider speaking in English in terms of making meaning from
an interpretation as part reading or using the language. To me, English can be helpful in interpretive
situations as a way to ensure that they truly understand, especially as Novice-Low language learners. I might
also time this if students are discussing the meaning in English to have as a separate number. I will use the
timer on my phone to keep track of time on task.



2. Recounting/Video Review
Video Review Class Recounting
For transcribed student-teacher interactions,
FS and MS are Female Student and Male
Student, respectively and T is for Teacher.

Class started with me requesting that students
Lean la tira. and Look for words you know
and words that look similar to words in English to
help you understand. After about 2 minutes, I
requested that students Hablan de la tira.
During this time I was taking attendance and
getting paper together to hand out later in class.
I also set a timer to remind me to start a new
recording.

During the discussion another student walked in
late, distracting another student to talk about
something unrelated to what we are doing. I
stopped them and ask them to get back on task.
One student was separated from the others, so I
went and helped her discuss to be sure she
understood. During this time, I allowed students
to speak in English to express what they
understood. This also allowed them to be in the
ZPD as they were discussing to gain more
insight if the need it. I heard lots of good
discussion about what happened. However, in
one or two situations only a couple of people
spoke. It may have been better to assign
something for everyone to answer. End of
discussion time as small groups and on to class
discussion.

T: Es comico, si o no?
MS : Si
T: Whats trying to be funny?
MS : The monster is shy. Thats not really
funny.
T: What does le gustan mean?
MS & FS- He likes
T: If a monster like something - we don t think of
a monster as being romantically involved, we
think about what they want to eat. Now, what
would make that funny?
MS: That hes not eating her.
T: What is this heart for?
FS: He likes her!
T: Good! What is ironia?
MS: I dunno.
T: Que tipos de ironia hay?
MS: Situational
T: Situacional
At the beginning of class, students came in as
usual and began working on their entrada.
During this time, students simply read the comic
and tried to understand it. I noticed some
students not on task during this time and
redirected them. I also took attendance and set
a timer so I could start a new recording. My
tablet stops recording at about 33 minutes. So I
had to start one video and start a new at about
that time.

Some things become evident very early on in
this class. I consider them my guinea pigs
since they are my first class of the day and I
have to work out the kinks with them. With this
lesson, I quickly realized that we had not spent
enough time seeing gustar. It has not been in
our curriculum yet, but they have seen it. For
my next classes, I included the meaning for this
phrase and it seemed to ease a lot of the issues.
Students were able to pick up on the textual
meaning, but had problems with the subtext.
Most of them seemed to have trouble with
understanding why it should be funny, but not
with understand what it was saying. I wonder if
this has to do with the capacity of the working
memory when their attention is on making
meaning of the text.

I forgot to give students the phrase beginnings
during the discussion phase of this activity, so
students were unable to do a whole lot of TL use
during this phase. However as previously noted,
the students in this class are pretty good about
using the TL in when at all possible. So, they
did a good job staying in the TL for a fair amount
of time. Nonetheless, they were asked to think
about what irony existed in the comic as well as
how that could be comical. During this time,
there were also a couple of students who were
attempting to work on math homework they had
has to ask to put away so that their focus was on
what we were doing.

After a couple of minutes of discussion, the class
shared about what the groups discessed.
Surprisingly, some of the students that I noted
held back in the last observation did not hold
back as much in this lesson. I was sure to give
them the floor when they requested it and
praised or affirmed their response before moving
MS: Verbal (English)
T: Verbal (Spanish)
MS: Dramatic
T: Dramatica

Students participated in describing each type of
irony as review to what they are learning in their
English classes and talked about the focus for
todays class.

T: What kind of irony is in the story?
No response.
MS: Hay dos.
T: Que es el objetivo?
FS - Students will read and draw a comic. I can
tell someone elses age, describe their
personality and physical characteristics.
MS (Simultaneously) YES!!! Excited about
drawing a comic.

One interesting point here is that two students
very quickly grasped the meaning of le gustan
(probably from previous experience), but other
students did not know, nor did they after
discussing as a class. This becomes evident
later as I am walking around the class helping
students with the activity at hand. I then passed
out the handouts with guiding questions for
students to complete that would lead them to
creating their own comic.

Just before answering questions about their own
monsters, my projector kept popping up with a
message on the screen that impeded us from
being able to see the comic on the screen.
Luckily, I had printed a few copies that I was
able to give to each table.

Por favor, responde en tu papel, Como es tu
monstruo? Como fue mi monstruo?

MS: Como se dice lazy?
T: Es parte de tu vocabulario
T: to a male student: Como es tu monstruo,
<student name>?
MS - Im thinking
T: (to group) ok numero dos...De donde es el
monstruo? Que significa?
MS - Where are you from?
T: Where are you from?
MS - Where is the monster from?
on. The students were quickly able to spot the
irony, identify its type and talk about what made
it funny (to some anyways).

After that students began creating their own
monstruos by answering questions (noted in
the first section) that were similar to the
questions posed during the bellwork. As an
example, the class created a monster and me
drawing the scenarios that we created as a
class. Students enjoyed this as they got to
make the story together (and make fun of my
drawings). We took votes on whose suggestion
was incorporated into the story. After the
example had been done together, we decided
on a monster who would be rejected because of
his looks who was really romantic at heart; a sort
of Beauty and the Beast story.

After the example was done, students spent the
remainder of class planning out their own by
writing a short description of the images they
would draw and beginning to write the text for
their comic. The students had many interesting
twists to what we read with their monsters,
including a monster from the bushes who was
extremely helpful and caring that brings flowers
to people and a monster from the sewer that
eats shoes ( not sure of any irony on that one.)
About half way through this time, students were
stopped for the announcements for just a minute
or so. Students got to work right after the
announcements ended without any reminder
from me.

Class ended with a reminder from me. First, that
if they werent good artists that they should bring
magazines or printed out clip art to help them
create their comic (as a precaution, I will have
some of my own printed out for them.). The bell
rang shortly thereafter.
T: Si

Students continued in this same manner figuring
out what each of the questions meant,
answering the questions about the monster in
the comic we read, and then answering the
questions about the monsters that they created.
When students would get into answering
questions about their monster, they would ask
several questions about how to say different
things in Spanish.

Interestingly, I think I may have seen something
that spurred students using much more of the TL
than I expected. When I was attempting to elicit
student questions, instead of saying Does
anyone have a question? I would say
something like Como se dice? or Que
significa?. I think that this led students to see
my expectation of how they should ask me
questions. After several questions of como se
dice, I permitted to use their ipads for looking up
words in the dictionary, but would often check
their work to see that what they were putting was
correct.

After all of the questions, we created a comic
together by first describing what was going to
happen in our comic and then me (attempting)
drawing it. During this time, I asked a lot of
binary questions to give them options. Students
responded well to the questions and were able
in most situations to answer the questions when
presented. I now notice that very few were
actually paying attention to me drawing this
comic out on the board when I was drawing. In
retrospect, this may have been a step I could
have skipped. I was sure to tell students No
soy artista. I am not grading on your ability to
draw here, but rather your inclusion of Spanish
to tell the brief story.

As we progressed in creating the story together,
class was interrupted when someone brought
me something. To be honest, I do not
remember what it was, but it only took a few
seconds and we got right back into creating out
comic. Just as we finished the class comic, the
announcements began. They ended with about
10 minutes for students to begin their drawings
and finish class. As they were doing that, I was
going around making sure that they understood
what they were doing and I spent most of that
time helping a few students in the same area.
Unfortunately, I could not hear all of my
interactions with the students because it was
fairly far from the camera and we were speaking
softly.





3. Reflection of Classroom Activities and Differences in Recounting and Observation
With this observation, I did not complete my recounting as quickly after the class period as I
did on the first observation. That being said, my memory was probably hazier and I was not able to
recall as many details. I found this observation to be especially enlightening compared to my memory
of the events of class. Earlier I had journaled about the progress this class has made in their use of
the TL when interacting in class on a day-to-day basis, but I think when I was watching this class, I
noticed for the first time an antecedent to this occurring in a class session. After I had posed
questions in terms of what they should say rather than saying are there any questions, I quickly got
many students with questions. I think that the effect was similar to the effect of giving students binary
options when showing their understanding of something we are reading or listening to. That was very
interesting to see and I definitely would not have recalled that as I do not have the capacity to pay
such close attention to the sheer number of types of questions asking while I am attending to so
many facets of student learning while there.
Another interesting point I noticed is which students were really on task. Having to take the
time to view individual students forced me to pay closer attention the first time when watching this for
the more general questions. I can tell you who is paying close attention to what we are doing and
who is simply going through the motions and not thinking about what is going on.

4. Reflection of Student Engagement, Interactions, and Time on Task, Student-Teacher

Student Engagement
After completing this lesson, I thought and believed that almost all of the students enjoyed and
were engaged in what we were doing. However, after watching the video I found that more students
than expected were not engaged during parts of the activities. I do recognize that my last two
activities were in general longer than they should have been due to students attention span at their
age. However, I can probably attribute some of this to students not being interested in the
assignment. I note this through the way students looked and acted. There were very few facial
expression that showed excitement for of displeasure for what we were doing. That tells me that
students were in general feeling no different about what was going on in class that day. Some were
eager to participate, but that was normal behavior for the students that were.

Interactions and Turn-taking
When I was looking at who initiated speaking turns in class, it seems that most of the time it is pretty
balanced and dependent upon student preference, rather than mine in most situations. I seem to accept a
student speaking without being called upon when I ask general questions aloud to the class and even respond
in kind when something is said that needs to be responded to. The few times that I did initiate students turn to
speak it was done by hand-raising. The main situation where this occurred was when students were
answering the questions about their monsters and needed help understanding or in knowing how to say a
word. I think that since I expected that students would all ask a question, I modeled how I wanted students to
ask their questions by raising my hand. That then signaled to students how I wanted them to get my attention
so they could speak. Another observation I made is that when speaking as a class and my eyes go around the
room making eye contact with students, I wonder if the students assume that I am speaking to them since eye
contact has been made and thus attempt to initiate (or feel that it has been initiated by me) and offer a
comment or answer. That could be where the common student adage Dont make eye contact with the
teacher. comes from. The topics of conversation were for the large part chosen by me and coincided with the
classroom objectives. Although on one occasion a student called to my attention the message that popped up
on the projector. Other than that I did not find any instances of students bringing up other topics.
I think that authentic discourse in a foreign language classroom can be defined in various ways,
depending on the level of the class. As already noted in my comments upon viewing the video, I am not sure
that using English in class when attempting to understand and assessing for understanding is necessarily a
bad approach. Not that it should be used in all situations, but it can be a tool among many. So then I would
say that authentic discourse is discourse that brings meaning into focus about an authentic text and that
learners express themselves as completely as they can in the TL and extend their comprehension through the
use of the native language.

Time on Task
At the end of this observation the chart is attached that includes the two students that I
observed for Time on Task (or language use time). From here on out I will refer to language use time
instead of Time on Task since I think that in some situations Time on Task can be misleading as it
can refer to students doing what they are supposed to be doing, but they may not be using the TL.
I have two initial observations about the time that I calculated the two students language use
time. First of all, by the nature of the activities as I had designed them, the last section of class did
not provide students for much opportunity to be in the TL since they were simply organizing their
thoughts about what was going to happen in their comic. They TL use ability is not to a point yet
where they would be able to brainstorm in such a way. Second, these two students are at different
performance levels but student 2 was distracted by so many unrelated things that it is hard to
compare even their abilities.
Nonetheless, from this observation I quickly was able to see an average language use time for
these two students and that probably represent a relatively accurate picture for this class of students.
I think what surprised me most was the causes for students not using the TL. I expected most
students that were not using the TL to be like student 2. That is, engaged in other activities
throughout the class (working on homework from another class, copying text from another students
text to keep up with what we were doing, and looking at parts of his iPad case). But from my
observations I can definitely say that these students were for the large part very engaged in what we
were doing. Student 1 is a student I would characterize as very highly engaged and represents the
higher end of the spectrum for this class. Knowing that, I would say his language use number is
relatively low (especially compared to ACTFLs 90% rule). Though, he was on task. The limitations
for his language use time do not come in form of his inability, but rather the lack of opportunities.
That to me was very eye opening. I can see very clearly that even though I am providing some
opportunities for students to use the TL, I need to provide far more than I already am.





Time has been cut out of this that was part of the school announcements.
Activity Activity
Time
Student 1
Engagement
Student 1 % Student 2
Engagement
Student 2 %
Entrada 1:55 1:55 100% 1:00 54%
Group Discussion
(in English
interpreting
meaning)
1:45 :55 52% :30 29%
Class Discussion 5:46 3:25 59% :25 7%
Answer Guiding
Questions
18:24 7:54 43% 3:15 18%
Creating Comic
Description (writing
in English)
20:04 :28 2.3% :03 .02%
Totals 47:54 14:37 31% 5:13 11%