But overall, she tried to use positive reinforcement such as praise, using mnemonic devices to encourage students to remember material, and asking them to repeat what they had learned. In other words, observation was an instructional tool used in structured as well as unstructured settings. An additional tool was repetition and reinforcement.
Students kept their corrected assignments in folders, which enabled the teacher to look at past assignments, and see if certain concepts were proving to be persistent problems. It also ensured that assignments could be more easily sent home for parental review and would not (hopefully) get lost if they were taking home loose in a backpack. Assignments spanned a wide range of workbook assignments, encompassing more open-ended and creative activities like compositions, as well as tests and quizzes.
The teacher said she often made frequent use of team-based activities that drew upon a full range of student's artistic as well as verbal and spatial elements, like building a replica of a building from history (the Egyptian Pyramids), answering workbook fact sheets as a group, or presenting lab experiment findings to the class. Other in-class challenges included smaller and less elaborate assignments like answering questions about a story together. Students were graded both individually and as a group for these team assignments. Although I could not observe...
She did use rewards in the form of gold stars on tests, but emphasized learning and cooperation. Although she said there was no cookbook formula of instruction that worked for all students, her general approach was to first use more conventional style drills, which would then be followed with more creative 'application' exercises, so the students could show they knew the material. However it was still important to repeatedly go back and reexamine the basics, either through quizzes or asking students questions during review periods. It was unrealistic to assume that the entire class would 'get it' after once, twice, or even several times and most aspects of student learning built on one another, like building blocks.
Having a sense of fun and creativity in the classroom, she told me, is always important. Overall, I thought her approach was effective as the students seemed happy to be there, and even when they struggled, they did not seem to be discouraged to the point that they disengaged with the learning process.
