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Field Report # 2

Jose Roberto Olvera Herrera

Education Department, Tarrant County College

EDUC-2301: Intro. To Special Populations.

Kathleen Sikes

Oct. 15, 2023

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Field Report # 2

Classroom Layout.

I am observing Bear Creek Middle School in Miss Amy Johansen's special education

class. In the classroom, the students are arranged in a semicircle around Miss Johansen, and the

students get to decide if they want to sit on a moving stool, a wheeled chair, or a normal one.

They have 2 more table settings that they use for other group activities There is no theme, and

the decoration is just some posters with motivational phrases; there are no PCs but all the

students have their own laptop that is used when necessary; Miss Johansen has a couple of cork

boards and posters with information such an emergency phone numbers, counselors information

and schedules for the day and week and several clocks and timers. She does not work on the

wallboards, instead, she has a mini whiteboard that she uses in front of the students.

The teacher’s workstation is an officelike desk in L form, with a monitor and a laptop,

and also has two bookshelves filled with personal items, and also. The classroom has no

windows, and the lighting is made of fluorescent tubes.

Lesson and engagement.

Miss Johansen helps kids with reading difficulties, and they use a workbook, they read

sentences and answer questions about the sentences. Before the lesson begins, she gives them a

snack break, where the students eat whatever, they have for snaking, the break is about 5

minutes, after this time passes, she gathers the kids around the table and gives a brief summary

of what they did last time and what they are doing this time. Sometimes the students start

rambling about things remotely related to the topic or the sentences they just read, In these cases,

Miss Johansen listens to the students and then asks a follow-up question if she can build on it, or
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otherwise, she redirects the attention by repeating the instructions or the question the students

needed to do or answer.

There is nothing posted on the boards, but the school follows the TEKS standards.

Meeting Needs.

The class was working on sounds and syllables of words, In the first activity Miss

Johansen said a word and the students needed to mention de sounds that compose that word, they

did it all together and then she asked individually to kids who struggled with the group word,

then they started filling out the workbook now working with syllables filling the blank on some

sentences, as mentioned above the only behavioral issue that I witnessed was when the kids

rambled; for example, one girl mentioned that her brother was working on something similar the

day before, and Miss Johansen redirect her by asking how did her brother answer the question.

Then, later in the class, they started talking to each other and Miss Johansen only started

counting down from 10 and the kids stopped the conversation and they focused again.

Miss Johansen works with the students by leading the reading of the workbook, she reads

one part, then she lets the kids read one by one, and then they start filling out their workbook, but

she follows along with the students’ progress. If there is an especially difficult question or word,

she stops them and asks for attention on the little whiteboard she has and writes down the

question and/or some key elements for the kids to answer.

Grouping strategies.

As mentioned before, the students are situated around Miss Johansen, and the groups are

small, between six and eight students per class, and they work as a group and individually at the

same time; during the whole class, they work alongside Miss Johansen and they answer

questions that all need to have on their books, but also they have to fill out parts that they do not
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need to share with their partners. I haven’t been present for an activity where the kids need to

work in pairs or smaller groups.

At one point one student was struggling with one word, Miss Johansen then turned to

face him directly and paid more attention to him, meanwhile, the rest of the group was working

in silence. Miss Johansen then wrote on her whiteboard the question, but the kid was trying to

avoid it by asking something unrelated, Miss Johansen did not answer this time and kept

“pushing” him to work on the written question. At the end, the kid finished the page, and the

teacher asked him to repeat the question and the answer in his own words. The kid struggled for

a moment, but his classmates encouraged him, and he was able to answer satisfactorily.