Teacher Observation: Chemistry

Yesterday I taught electron configurations and atomic orbitals to my chemistry students. My mentor teacher and I spent a long time going over various aspects of the lecture and how it was going to go. I felt good about my teaching, despite the varying response from students. Many were frustrated by the new language they were learning. One student came up to me after class and said "I think you did a great job, they're (the other students)  just crazy." I was interested to see my mentor teach this same lesson for several reasons. First, I haven't seen him lecture a whole lot and felt I could benefit from watching him do so. Second, I wanted to compare what I did to what he did. So I observed my chemistry mentor teach during sixth period, a class I have never interacted with.

ML opened the class with a warm-up that was part of his notes but he had them fill out in their warm-up sheets. I like the way he elicited prior knowledge about the topic he was covering and I think the students benefited from this exercise. He then used a mix of questioning techniques to hear answers to the warm-up. He both randomly called on people and asked for volunteers to answer. Once the students were through the warm-up, he posted announcements for the students to write down and while he passed out a handout to the class. This was a great use of disrupted time as the students needed to copy down the homework and it gave him an opportunity to pass out something the students needed. One classroom management technique I observed ML use was the power dynamic he set up at the beginning of class. I'm not sure if it was the words he used or the way he said it, but there was a tone set that he was in charge of the next fifty minutes and the students were to follow his lead.  At various points throughout the lecture he reminded them of this by saying things like, "will you let me finish?" "hold your questions for a second," etc. As far as instruction goes, I know that ML does not lecture very often. There are scattered lecture days among many work days, work sheets, drills, labs, web explorations, etc. The lecture days are used primarily to get a concept across so the students can then interact with that concept and master it. Electron configuration charts must be taught because of the abstract nature of the drawings. Asking students to come up with how to do that would be extremely time-consuming and unrealistic. However, ML uses the time following lectures to give students a chance to interact with the concept and explore different patterns they may see. Towards the end of the lecture, ML encouraged students to try the new material on their own or in their groups using white boards. Although not highly technical, white boards are essential to chemistry classrooms so students can interact with the abstract concepts they learn.

There were several differences between ML's lecture and mine. I think several of the differences are just in our personalities. Additionally, he has been doing this for so long and is so comfortable with the material that he is able to free the mental space to expand his teaching repertoire. One way he does this is with many different analogies. I need to use more analogies to explain the chemistry concepts. Chemistry is so abstract that models and analogies are necessary to master the concepts. I thoroughly enjoyed observing my mentor teacher in this informal way with a set of students I have no responsibility for. It was a good experience and gave me an even better understanding of the chemistry class at my placement school.