FORMATIVE EVALUATION OF OBSERVATION

Employee: Aaron Backlin

Date: Nov. 1st, 2016
Situation Observed: Spanish 3A

Mr. Backlin starts class by reviewing the homework sheet choosing the correct subjunctive or
indicative form of the verb with students and clarifying any issues they had regarding their
understanding of that particular topic. Once the student questions regarding the homework were
finished, he asked the students to get into groups and discuss the question that Mr. Backlin throws
out: For which final are you most nervous about? The students formed their own groups of 3-5
students and began to discuss their answers to this question while Mr. Backlin worked his way
from group to group to assess their conversations and interject questions of his own, clarifications,
and follow-up statements to keep the conversations on-track and to spur additional conversations
within those particular groups. Once he had made it to each group, Mr. Backlin asks the students
to take their seats and directs them to get onto Canvas to work through some examples of when
speakers would use the subjunctive. After students were finished with this task, Mr. Backlin took
them through more of an in-depth explanation concerning when they subjunctive is used in
Spanish (the purpose is to express doubt or uncertainty) and to identify some of the triggers or
clauses that causes one to use the subjunctive. Using some impersonal expressions and many
examples of the triggers, Mr. Backlin modeled that in Spanish, emotional expressions are seen as
an unreliable expression of truth and that they are based only on the speakers perspective and
experiences (People with masks cannot be trusted).

Strengths / Standards Demonstrated:

The strengths of the lesson included the overall student engagement (student conversations
charlas and the data that Mr. Backlin gleaned from those conversations to address broader
issues with negotiating meaning, pronunciation, vocabulary usage, etc.), Mr. Backlins content
knowledge, energy, and ease of explanation of a fairly abstract concept to students in a way they
could digest it, and his overall interaction with his students (which is always positive and
encouraging of risk-taking, etc.). Iowa Teaching Standards Demonstrated include: 1b, 1c, 1e, 2a,
2b, 2c, 2d, 3b, 2c, 2d, 2e, 4b, 4d, 4f, 5e, 6a, 6b, 6d, & 6e.

Suggestion(s) Based on Observation:

During our post-observation conference, there were very few suggestions that were made to Mr.
Backlin for this particular lesson. One of the things that was mentioned to strengthen the charlas
portion of the lesion would be to possibly have students in groups of no more than three students
to keep the conversations on track and in Spanish. There were a couple of groups (4-5 students)
that may have meandered off of the Spanish conversation because their groups were a bit bigger
(however, it also could have been because of the make-up of the group). The other idea that was
thrown out was to give students some additional questions or sentence stems to use to keep those
conversations going while Mr. Backlin was going from group to group to assess these
conversations, although the downside to this is that if you give students a list of questions to
discuss you are eroding the authenticity of the conversation and then the rabbit ceases to be
chased in Spanish, so to speak.

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Employee Acknowledgement Date

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Evaluator Date