Class observation day

At my cc, we get observed in the classroom often. At least it seems often to me because it's way more often than I got observed at my previous school (which was like once in 10 years). In your first year here, you have to be observed by your department chair each quarter, and one of those quarters has to include a week-long observation (back-to-back sessions of the same class). After that first year, you get observed once a year, in one class, on one day. Your chair stays the whole class period, fills out a long standardized form, writes a review, and then meets with you to discuss things.

Tomorrow's my once-a-year observation. 10-11:25 a.m., English 100, in a regular (not a computer-equipped) classroom. This will be the first time my chair's observed me in a regular classroom, and the first time he's seen me teaching developmental writing. And we're only a week-and-a-half into the quarter, so it'll be the first time he's seen me working with "new" students.

All the other times he's observed me, I've spent a lot of time fiddling with my lesson plan, obsessing about whether the students were going to participate well, making back-up plans in case the computer system died. But in the end, the classes always went fine, and I always got positive reviews.

This time, I haven't obsessed at all. (Maybe I'm getting lazy? Maybe I'm just getting comfortable with the observation thing? Maybe my OCD is finally under control?) Here's what I'm gonna do, and it's nothing fancy, and much of it is stuff my local cohort did last summer as part of the National Writing Project:

1. Distribute Monday's end-of-class inkshed (little reflective comments they write on little slips of paper; all the slips get copied onto one sheet and distributed at the next class).

2. Do a read-around of final drafts of students' "I am From" poems. Encourage commentary on/questions about each person's poem and process of writing it.

3. Introduce our first paper assignment. Talk about narrative; talk about writing processes; point out the condensed writing process they just went through to create their poems.

4. Read and discuss a narrative poem by Lawson Inada called "Rayford's song" (in order to connect their earlier poetry writing with this brand-new paper assignment). Talk about narrative elements of the poem. Talk about the main point of the poem: a little boy's song (and, by extension, culture) gets "corrected"--squashed, really--by his teacher, and then nobody else in the class wants to sing their own song. Talk about school-sanctioned topics/stories versus "real" stories.

5. Work through some brainstorming prompts for topic ideas for their first paper: encourage them to draw on some image/idea/story from their "I am From" poem.

6. Write a final inkshed.

That's it. Very processy and expressivist. It's very different from what I've done the other times I've been observed (which was more cultural studies, social-epistemic sorts of stuff--and very technology-focused stuff). But I think/hope it'll be okay.