Field Visit #3

This week, I was keeping an eye on certain behaviors of the students and really observing how Ms. C dealt with it. In the morning, she had a couple kids come up to her with problems and she had suggested that they solve them amungst themselves, which was described in Weinstein. I, fortunately, have not noticed any serious situation, so this approach has been successful for her and her classroom. I even noticed that some of the children started to sort things out on their own without asking Ms. C first.

Other distractions that I noticed occurred during the morning meeting. The class was discussing whether or not they thought that we use the same water that existed with the dinosaurs and one of the students kept covering his face with his shirt while he was talking. It seemed apparent that this has been a problem that occurred previously because she told Ethan that she didn't want to see him do it anymore and that they had talked about it. It was all done really quickly and none of the children seemed to have been distracted by it since we were all sitting in a circle.

Another behavioral issue I noticed was from one of the troublemakers, R. She had received a time out during one of our previous visits and I noticed that they had a teaching assistant in the room. I asked Ms. C and she said that the assistant was there to monitor R's behavior. With that in mind, I kept an eye on the interaction between the assistant and R. For the morning meeting, I was sitting next to R and the assistant was on the other side of the circle. R was behaving really well and was sitting there with her legs crossed like all the other children and I noticed the assistant make eye contact with her and put a green stamp in a chart that was 1/2 filled. I didn't get a chance to talk to the assistant because she monitors the behavior of other students in other classes, but you could tell that it was some kind of way to get R more aware of her actions. This is like what Weinstein talked about with self monitoring. Hopefully with a continued effort by the assistant, R will learn what behaviors are acceptable and will start to show those behaviors more often. I had definitely noticed that she was a lot more obedient this class than previous visits, but she was not feeling well so that might have been a contributing factor as well.

In terms of monitoring behavior and consequences, the one thing I noticed were pockets with the children's names on them and was taped on the door. There were different color slips of paper that signified different things. One was for nice work, one was a 2 minute time out, one was a 5 minute time out and another was a phone call home. These are all consequences of behavior that Ms. C used to make the students more aware of their behavior. Other than that, we haven't been there when a child acted out.