Observation Field Notes

This semester I was able to observe my collaborating field experience teacher, Mr. Burgess, teach two math lessons. His lesson did not require many materials. He used paper, pencils, and the SmartBoard. When introducing the lesson, Mr. Burgess showed the class a picture of a median. After allowing time for the students to look at this picture and gather their thoughts, Mr. Burgess asked the students what were they looking at on the board. Mr. Burgess called on a few students and he then started breaking down what the median was in math. Mr. Burgess included a PowerPoint on mean and median. The students had already learned what the mean was prior to this lesson. After going over what the median was, Mr. Burgess then had the students practice finding the median of random number. The numbers were all randomly chosen and the students themselves gave some set of numbers. To my surprise, the students were actually interested and grasped the concept. Mr. Burgess gave the students adequate time to find the median of the sets of numbers. On the following day, Mr. Burgess went over the lesson that they discussed the prior day. After the reviewing, Mr. Burgess told the students what the mode of a set of numbers were. He constructed his lesson pretty much the same way that he did before. When it was time for students to participate in an activity, Mr. Burgess separated the students into four teams. The students activity for the math lesson was to compete against each other to solve as many problems in a set number of time. They were required to find the mean, median, and mode numbers found in different word problems. Mr. Burgess displayed one word problem at a time and gave the groups one minute and thirty seconds to solve them. The students worked

together well, which was actually surprising. You could see that they grasped all the concepts overall and were able to fulfill the required tasks. Even though students were grasping the concepts, in between displaying problems Mr. Burgess walked around each group and interacted with them to gauge their learning. He asked questions to see if students were on task and to see if concepts were learned.