Formal Teaching Observation 1

Formal Teaching Observation #1

Max Freedman

California State University, Chico

EDTE 265

David Teja

September 24 2023
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The CalTPE standard I selected to evaluate the teacher in Atlas case 142, "Investigating

Absorption of Soils," is TPE 1: Engaging and Supporting All Students in Learning.

This particular teacher is very engaged with each of her students; she divides her time

interestingly among each group, spending several minutes with each group, ensuring all

questions are answered and ideas are flowing. This teacher encourages meaningful conversations

through great leading questions and providing quality insight when needed. Once these

conversations start happening, she then feels like she can move on to the other groups.

This teacher's interactions with her students change based on the groups she is visiting,

which is an excellent demonstration of a teacher adapting teaching styles to support her students'

needs better. For example, in the first group she visited, the students were eager to answer her

questions and engage with the experiment. Thus, the teacher took a more back seat approach

when interacting with this first group and allowed them to steer the conversations the way they

wanted. However, with her later groups, the students were more hesitant to answer and needed

more push to get the ball rolling. So, the teacher stepped up and started asking leading questions

until the students could grasp what they were trying to learn.

These interactions with the students are a great demonstration of parts one, two, and three

of TPE 1. This teacher adapts to her students' needs, addressing part one. She communicates

effectively with her students, covering part two. Due to the nature of this experiment, these

students are learning applicable and realistic concepts about soil, which covers the third part.

This teacher also covers parts 5 and 8 of this standard. She allows her students to engage

with this experiment, and then she has them critically think about what happened and come up

with answers as to why and how. This way of learning was highly effective because students can
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learn from each other. The teacher is also present to ensure that everyone stays engaged and

learns from this experiment.

This teacher rounds out the last two parts of the standard by ensuring that her lesson is

accessible for everyone, especially those with disabilities or in the bilingual program. While it

didn't seem that this teacher needed to make accommodations for students with specific needs,

given the students in her classroom, this teacher could have easily adapted this lesson for anyone

with those needs.

Finally, the teacher incorporates visual art into this lesson by asking students to draw

images depicting what is happening. This is an excellent way to integrate art into the lesson.