Planning and Instruction

At the Elementary School in the fourth grade classroom, the teacher already has established a daily planner and shares the day’s agenda with me before the students come into the classroom for the start of the day.  The students are working on their benchmark testing and the day I had my field study, the fourth graders were testing over Social Studies.  This is the only form of "achievement tests" that the students really have, since the class is fourth grade geometry.  The students seems stressed and anxious about this test and when I asked them, they told me that it was the third day in a row that they were taking tests.  Because of the testing that was going on in the entire fourth grade, the teachers had a different instructional plan than the previous week.  During the “conference” time, the teachers talk about the plans for the day and what all they want to try and accomplish, especially since the three fourth grade classes rotate throughout the day.  As the classes begin to rotate, my mentor teacher is a specialist in math and is working on a practice test all three classes have accomplished the prior week.  After giving back the practice tests back, she asked me to take the students who scored below a 60 to a separate room to work on their practice test with them.  I found this to be extremely beneficial for the students and I see who having a co-teaching system can be utilized. I was unable to see differentiated instruction in the classroom, because the student with special needs was taken out of the room for testing.