Classroom and School Context
I honestly had no expectations for the students, just because I never worked or observed children younger than 8th grade. Yet, if I have to be honest, I did have 1 expectation, which was that they were going to be very energetic. I had this expectation because of the time that I and Rafael observe these students is after school, so the students have their minds somewhere else. I did have some things on the back of my mind though. I knew that some of the students were a little behind on the standards that they needed to meet, which was why they were in the after-school mentoring program that I observed.
Student Learning
Some of the ways that student learning happens is during the first 45 minutes of the program. Each student has their own mentor and during that time the mentor helps them with either homework, classwork, or any other material that student requires tutoring in. Since it is an after-school program, the students just being reinforced on the material that their teacher gave them in class.
As we observed the mentoring part (which we won’t be attending for future reference) we looked at some of the student work that some of the kids were working on.
These 2 images are pictures of student homework
The first day we observed we did not really notice a lot of the mentoring part or much of how the mentoring program ran, but through a simple look around some shoulders, we noticed some possible standards. The students, within the math courses, are looking at equations and graphs, and the relationship between multiple variables.
Other ways that students were being assessed was through Mathia, which is more of an online site that tests students based on mastery of a topic and/or standard.
Teacher needs
As far as I am concerned, I and Rafael will be looking to see what the teacher needs are by asking the mentors of the students. Since most were not there, we asked to see what math material they were doing, to have a sense of what Common Core Standard their teachers are going over.
The only requirement that our placement teacher, Beatrice, has for us, was to make the activities or lessons fun. This is simply because the students would participate more if it is not regulated like their classes.
So far the HPS media release form was not passed. There have been difficulty with having it approved on time, but said they might use previous signatures that they used for another event. That was my understanding.