Camera on students revisited (March 23)

As my tracking talking has shown, and continues to show, my talking is steadily going down.

I decided I needed to revisit videoing a lesson and see how my case study student did again, as well as the rest of the class this time.

The class did very well in this lesson, actually setting a new low record for total amount of talking times.

I have mixed feelings about how my two case study students did.

To refresh your memory and mine, I took the summary from my last post when I observed one of my case study students: R.

"In summary,
My case study student started showing problem behaviors when:
-direction wasn't given after he had gotten his supplies ready
-he wasn't able to keep up with lesson
-we changed to an activity where he could not write with his marker
-his partner distracted him
-after he was punished
-he had given up on the lesson"

The major positives for this student on the more recent filming are that he did participate with every question that I asked the class to do, both when I had them use markers and not. Also, he only talked out once during the entire lesson, and he didn't have to be punished during it, which partly allowed him to keep working.

These are both major accomplishments for this student, and ultimately he did significantly more work during this lesson than he did on the last one I recorded. Part of it is my changes, for example, I tried to start the lesson quicker to not allow for distractions, I also have changed how I did my lesson (mostly from watching Donalyn) to include ample amounts of praise, and he, as well as the rest of the class, was able to benefit from my correcting everyone in the class as the lesson went on.

Part of it I attribute to the behavior charts, and the realization that he was able to be quiet with those and gradually wean himself from needing to give himself the happy faces to be quiet. Part of it is from him setting his personal behavior goals to stay quiet, or earn one of the prizes in phonics.

Unfortunately, it is not all positive. He did get out of his seat without permission a lot. I have no idea what he was doing as I didn't notice it in real time, and he walks out of video range when he gets up, but he does somehow manage to return to his seat for every question. I wonder if he was just bored as I gave affirmative or corrective answers to the class on each question and he found that it was easier to amuse himself by just walking around instead of getting in trouble for playing or talking. And honestly, although he shouldn't be randomly walking around during a lesson... the fact remains that him doing so kept him quiet, and stopped him from fiddling with something in his desk, and again, he answered every question that I posed to the class... so still a plus in some ways. But it was after almost every question that he got up and went... somewhere.

N's behavior was mixed on this lesson as well. He talked out a rather high amount, just short of his highest in the beginning of the inquiry, 3 times (the highest recorded was 5, but he probably could have gone higher, but I won't let him talk out that much without higher consequences, and those subdue him temporarily). After the three, he did receive a tally for his continual shouting out, mostly because I felt it was unfair to ruin one of the prizes for the class all due to his lack of self control.

However, he has a positive too- He actually was participating on every question as well. He was upset when he got the tally, and he refused to get into his chair after it, but I have learned to pick my battles with him, and since, while sitting on the floor, he was still answering each question, I ignored his choice of seat.

This seems like a major compromise to count it a victory for both students when one was still getting out of his seat all of the time, and the other pulled a tally for talking, but the fact remains that they did both show full participation as far as the phonics lesson goes, practicing each thing that was going to be on the next day's test, even with all of their problems in between. And for these two, although I, for logistical reasons, cannot track the amount of on task behaviors for the phonics lessons over the time, I know from my personal experience that this is an improvement for both of them. They both tend to fiddle, or walk around, or draw on their white boards and generally do anything besides the task at hand, so to see them now managing to stay focused on the lesson rings of success.

The flip side is that it does show that the classroom is still not perfect, much improved, but still not perfect. I know this is the reason that the last step is always apply, because there are almost more things to apply in the classroom, and I know that every particular collection of students will present a new challenge that will grow and stretch me in new ways, and that's good.