Michelle CotterClinical Supervision Report

  1. Description of the characteristics of the instructional environment:
  • Years of teaching experience: 2nd year teacher of 5th grade in VA, previously worked as a 2nd grade teacher for 6 years in GA.
  • Mrs. Gipson is always striving to become a better teacher, receives feedback well, and collaborates with her team. Although she is a highly effective teacher, she is not fully secure in her teaching ability and often second guesses herself. She had a challenging class last year as a first year teacher and feels that this year she is finally able to delve in and understand and work through content without spending so much time dealing with behavior problems. Mrs. Gipson works particularly well with special education and below grade level students and prefers working with these students.
  • Mrs. Gipson is well versed in data collection and keeps excellent records of her students’ progress.
  • Mrs. Gipson believes that students perform better in small group and has set up her classroom to have guided math groups, small guided reading groups, and works with her students in weekly writing conferences.
  1. Timeline:
  • Pre- Conference:February 18th, 2014
  • Pre-Observation: February 18th & February 25th
  • Observation: March 10th, 2014
  • Post- Conference: March 12th, 2014
  1. Pre- Conference:
  • Subject and Grade level: Observed a 5th grade class during transition from recess to whole group and then to small group reading.
  • Instructional Focus: After various pre- observations of Mrs. Gipson’s class, we decided together that the biggest issue at this time was transitions. Prior to coming in for language arts the students are in lunch and then recess, the come in for language arts for the last hour and fifteen minutes of the day. Not only does the class transition from recess, during language arts 2 students leave for special education services and all students’ transition from whole group instruction to small group guided reading or independent work stations.
  • Instructional Observation Tool: (Attached) I created a form to track transition times and off task behaviors. The tracking sheet was used to track time for students to get into the classroom, time to get materials and be prepared in seats, number of prompts by teacher, number of off task behaviors during lesson and number of occurrences, and length of time to transition to small group.
  1. Observation:During my observation I observed a smooth transition from recess into the classroom for the whole group lesson. Within three minutes 95% of the class was settled in their seats and needs no prompts or reminders from the teacher. By four minutes into the classroom all students were seated for the lesson. One student (who leaves to go to special education resource classroom @ 2:15) turned her chair to sit and watch clock, Mrs. Gipson redirected her. The other student who leaves the classroom for services was observed up and out of his seat three times and asked twice to put away and stop playing with pencils during the fifteen minute lesson. A few students who were seated for the lesson took some time to become engaged, observed students playing with ruler, sharpening pencils etc. Two students were occupied with other work other then the lesson for a majority of the lesson (one reading a book, the other working on make up work). Boys in front of the room participated the most, very engaged raising hands a lot. At one point Mrs. Gipson asked the class to act out the word clutched and 100% of students were engaged and acting out the word. During the lesson there were no observed side conversations. The class began transitioning (some to small group with teacher the rest to independent work) at 2:26 and by 2:32 all students were transitioned and engaged in work.
  2. Analysis of the observation: I found that Mrs. Gipson had very good classroom management; she had to use very few prompts to get the majority of her class to make smooth transitions and engaged in her lesson. One of the biggest issues both she and I noticed was the lack of participation and engagement from her students who left after the small group lesson for special education services. These students were very antsy and just waiting to leave; they did not seem to have any accountability to what was occurring in the class. The class, while not having side conversations or being overtly off task, was not too engaged in the English lesson. It seemed to me that some of the issues with transitioning come from the fact that the subject matter taught directly after recess is not very interesting to most students and more about teacher lecture and less student involved.
  3. Post Conference:
  • Supervisory Style: Collaborative
  • Summary of discussion: Mrs. Gipson and I first discussed how she saw the transition go and what I observed. We both were on the same page about seeing the lack of engagement of the special education students as one of the biggest issues. I briefly discussed what I observed, giving positive feedback on what I noticed, as well as, some of the off task behaviors and disengagement I saw during the lesson. After discussing the observation we talked about some ideas of how we could help the special education students and how to make grammar and English lessons more engaging. We discussed involving the special education teacher in coming up with some idea of how to get the students who leave to be more involved and accountable for their time in the general education classroom. Some ideas we discussed for making grammar more engaging was some hands- on activities, turn and talk and think-pair-share.
  1. Reflection:This experience was very eye opening for me. I had always thought of observations as more of evaluative and not as constructive as I found the clinical supervision to be. I found it challenging while observing to just sit and tally/ observe only off task behaviors and watching the clock to record time. I ended up taking notes on other things I observed and our post conference changed a bit due to this. I was there to see how long it took the students to transition from recess to grammar lesson and from grammar lesson to small group/ independent work stations, but m observation turned into more observing students’ behaviors during the lesson. I think that although we had decided to focus solely on transitions, my feedback of my observations was helpful to the teacher. Another aspect I found challenging was the post conference; I had to really sit and map out what I wanted to say and leading questions for the teacher. I was afraid I would do too much of the talking and coaching, however I found that the conversation was very two sided. We discussed what we both observed and talked about some ideas of solutions for aspects that needed to be worked on. I think I picked a great teacher to work on this type of supervision as she is a very reflective teacher who is always looking to better her instruction. As a teacher myself, I prefer this over just receiving visits for evaluation purposes. I feel that there are aspects of my classroom and certain groups that I would like some outside feedback and help with, and I think many teachers who are reflective practitioners would feel the same. The difficulty I see in this as a principal is time. I think this model of supervision is so valuable to both the teacher and the supervisor, the teacher gets feedback and help in an area they would like to improve and the supervisor gets a chance to really know teachers. I think this supervision style would also be helpful to teams of teachers working with teacher other, I think teachers could give each other great constructive criticism and often respect each other’s opinions and if time allowed, this would be a great method to try.