Shadowing Students

A couple of weeks ago I spent two days shadowing students in two different year groups (S1 and S3). In this post I will outline my main reflections from the experiences from the two days. I am not going to go into details of the classes I attended.

The students were welcoming to me and (after an initial period of staying away from me from S1) involved me in the lessons. In the future I would make a bigger deal of talking with the students beforehand about why I was there, and what I was going to do.

The teaching I saw over the two days was great, and varied. Each teacher let their personality and teaching style show through, and this meant that at no point did I feel like I was going through a factory system. There were lessons that were teacher led and lessons that were more directed by the students. There were teachers acting as experts and teachers acting as facilitators. There was group work and there was individual work. There was directed questioning and open ended questioning. None of these were better or worse than the other, and it was nice to see that students get a varied approach throughout the day.

One thing that was immediately obvious was the cost of switching languages. Although the students are more proficient in both languages than I am in Spanish, switching between languages throughout the day was tiring. In particular, I started the day with S1 with 4 single periods in a row, switching between subjects and languages. It was hard to recall what we had looked at in the first two lessons by the end of this part of the day. Fortunately, some time in Art allowed me to collect my thoughts as I worked on my piece of artwork individually. Interestingly, the Learning How To Learn course I have been doing these last few weeks makes it clear that focused attention needs to be interspersed with times of "dispersed thinking" when the brain can make connections in the background, and this experience chimed with this for me.

A couple of students from S3 commented to me that the jump from Middle School to S3 was quite big, both in terms of workload and the thinking we require from them in class. This was following a lesson where they were being asked to think deeply about a particular topic, and really pushed to explore their understanding.

One thing that did jump out to me was how little writing students did during the days. There was a lot of exploratory talk and discussion, but not much was written down. I do wonder how we encourage students to keep notes to review later, and if we actively encourage students to do this review process? Without recording things, it must be hard for students to revise for assessments.

Overall I thought it was a very interesting couple of days, and an insightful experience. If you ever get the opportunity to do the same thing, I would strongly recommend it. You get a very different view of how things work at school. Perhaps next year I will spend a week as a student and do all the homework and other tasks as well, to get an even better picture of what is going on.