Ryan Tran

EDU 202
Karen Chester
4 December 2022

Field Observation Essay

I completed my field observation at Arbor View High School. This is the high school that I

used to attend so I was familiar with the school however I was going in through a new lens. I

went to the school on October 20 2022 and October 24 2022. I was observing Mr. Leets who is

the current AP Physics teacher as well as the GeoScience teacher. Mr. Leets implemented a

variety of learning styles and his classes were very student oriented.

Mr. Leets was helpful in helping me see things through a teacher’s perspective. I had

asked him how he deals with a rowdy crowd since he is a high school teacher. He noted that he

talks to the student calmly and lets them know they are being disruptive. He solves the problem

calmly without escalating the situation. If things do not get solved, Mr. Leets will pull the student

out of the class and have a one on one talk with them to see why they are being disruptive. The

most important thing that he noted was that he and the student will reach a compromise and

find the best way to go about the situation. He noted that he has classroom rules and on the first

day of class he will go over them with his students. He says that the rules are there for a reason

and if a student would like to challenge him on it they may challenge him on it however no one

has stepped up to the plate. I thought that this was very useful information because he enforces

himself as the authority figure without having a totalitarian reign on the classroom. By giving the

students a chance to challenge his rules, he is allowing students to have freedom of speech and

it allows students to think for themselves rather than him telling them how to think. This is

definitely an idea I would like to take back with me into my classroom because I want to be the

authority figure but not be a dictator. I can explain my classroom rules to the class and ask any

student why they think I have a certain rule in place. I believe that if I explain my rules, then my

students are more likely to follow them because they understand the rules.
 Mr. Leets and I talked about students with disabilities and how their role in the

classroom. Mr. Leets noted that they incorporated mainstreaming into the classroom.

Mainstreaming is when a student who receives special education is placed inside a regular

classroom with a second teacher. I saw this particularly in Mr. Leets’s second period where he

had a second teacher with him. His second period was his GeoScience class and they were

completing a lab where they were paired into groups and worked hands on to apply the lesson

being taught. Mr. Leets was constantly walking around and helping students out and never sat

at his desk idly. The second teacher also walked around and helped students while conversing

with Mr. Leets about how the students who received special education were performing. They

created a cooperative environment to give students the best chance of learning. One thing I

would have liked to see changed was how the groups were selected. I learned that groups are

most effective when there is a mixture of academic performances between the students. For

example, all of the higher performing students should not be in a group together; there should

be a high performing student with a lower performing student. Mr. Leets let the students choose

their own groups so it ended up with uneven groups.

Mr. Leets’s fifth and sixth period were his biggest classes with about 30-40 students. I

saw that it was difficult to keep every student on task especially since there were so many

students. He put the students on task to complete a worksheet and to do a hands on lab but still

there were so many students. By letting the students work on a hands-on lab, Mr. Leets

demonstrated a student oriented style of learning. Mr. Leets noted that he could bore students

with a 36 slide PowerPoint but chose not to. He allowed the students to work together and use

any resource to answer the worksheet given. Some students got the answers by watching a

Youtube video thus showing a linguistic or musical style of learning. He tried his best to visit

each small group to check on how they were doing and make sure they were on task. I learned

that there was not much one can do about having a huge class, one can only do the best they

can in the situation.

 There were some good things I saw in Mr. Leets’s class. For example I saw him

incorporate a warm up question to reinforce previous knowledge. I learned that from a teacher’s

perspective that warm ups can be useful because they allow you to have a small amount of free

time while your students are doing something. Mr. Leets took attendance while students were

working on the warm up and then walked around the class to make sure that students took out

their notebooks to work on the warm up. In his AP Physics class he would work out the warm up

question on the board for his students. One thing to note is that he did not do the question, he

allowed the students to tell him what steps to take to get to the correct answer. Mr. Leets

provided his AP Physics students feedback on their most recent test and allowed them to do a

retake of the questions they got wrong. I thought that this was particularly helpful because he is

making sure students understand the concept and is giving them a chance to grasp the content.

I connected this action to the student oriented style of learning. He was letting the students learn

at their own pace and the students moved on when they demonstrated knowledge of the

concept. Since there was math incorporated into AP Physics, students who excel with the

logic-mathematical approach were able to learn in their preferred style.

Mr. Leets created a positive learning environment with his GeoScience students during

the warm up. He would ask the students to answer the questions out loud and would hand out a

Jolly Rancher to the students that answered and got it correct. I connected this action to positive

reinforcement since students were being rewarded for participating and answering the question

correctly. Personally I really liked seeing Mr. Leets do this because it encourages students to

participate. Those who got a Jolly Rancher would keep participating to get more, but those who

did not get one would try harder to get a Jolly Rancher next time. One thing I saw Mr. Leets do

was call on a variety of students who had their hand raised, rather than picking the same people

over and over. Overall I liked my observation with Mr. Leets and noticed that he incorporated

many different teaching styles and that his classroom was more student oriented rather than

teacher oriented.