Vince Cancilla - Buffalo Prep Reflection

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Pre-Student Teaching Observation Reflection

EDU 667 Dr. Ahuna

Best Practice Focus

The main thing that stood out to me at Buffalo Prep was the ability of the male teacher
who occasionally visited the room to facilitate transitions between subjects and to get the
classes attention and focus their through the means of a classroom management technique.
This was clearly something he had developed with the class and that had become almost
automatic, it was quite impressive how instantly responsive the children were. Basically, hed
say something like Attention up here, and clap his hands, saying Clap one time, then
Clap two times, Clap threes, then Ok, everyone focused. I cant recall the exact words he
used, but amazingly he spoke very softly, but as soon as he got the first clap in, the class would
immediately catch on and by the third clap the entire class was silent and listening.
I think this technique was so effective because it uses a loud audible cue for the
children to catch on to, the children themselves participate in this cue, and it bonds the whole
class together as group. It also establishes a teacher / student hierarchy very well, with the
teacher leading with the first clap and the call and response effect is quite catchy.

Setting
This experience took place on the University of Buffalo campus, in a small building
that felt like a large portable in some ways. Buffalo Prep is a school for inner-city youth that
recruits gifted and high achieving students and prepares them for entrance into higher quality
or Ivy league high schools.

The students observed were mainly African-American, with an

equal mix of males and females in grade 6 and 7, and the time of year was fall of 2014.
Description
We visited Buffalo Prep on two separate occasions as a group. On the first occasion,
one teacher was absent and so a large group of students was split into two classes and divided

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into separate rooms, but both groups were learning the same math lesson and the teacher went
from one room to the next.

The teacher facilitated at the beginning by explaining the

assignment and dividing the students up into smaller study groups, where they had to go
through a packet of exercises on a specific theme (budgeting and finances) together.

The

students took turns reading parts of the lesson out loud and then sharing answers. Myself and
the other student-teachers floated around the room observing and interacting with the groups.
Afterward they transited to a different lesson, where visiting lawyers from a local law
firm gave the class a law case that was currently being disputed in courts to learn about, where
they read about the use of celebrity likenesses in video games and copyright issues, and then
were divided into 3 groups: Judges, Defendants, and Plaintiffs. In groups they read through
the outlines of the legal issues and then had to take turns defending their position to the
judges. It was a highly interactive and enthusiastic activity and the children loved it.

Analysis (Connection/Links)
The best practice in this scenario connects well with what we were learning about
classroom management in terms of understanding the differences between rules, procedures,
and routines. The teacher who facilitated the transition from math to the law activity had
clearly established a routine with the children, and had gotten the routine to the point of
being instantaneous and automatic.

The students were participants in their own classroom

management, which also ties in with the idea of co-construction with the curriculum (students
crafting expectations and consequences or grades for assignments).

So this particular best

practice has multiple elements woven into it and appears to be very effective.
Applications
This best practice could be adapted for specific classes, where you could choose a catch
phrase that relates to the subject being taught. This could be both a routine for classroom

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management and even a memory aid for specific subjects (for example, you could list off
elements in the period table for a science class, choosing 3 of them, one for each call and
response). Having observed a lot of scattered behaviour especially in the Essentials classes Ive
observed, I think this best practice would work well with those streams of students because it
provides structure and community in shaping the class atmosphere and helps the teacher to
command the attention and respect of the students. Ive noticed with many of the Essentials
classes that the teachers sometimes lack discipline and everyone is doing their own thing,
getting distracted by cell phones, etc., and the teacher is somewhat run rough-shod over by the
students.

I think this best practice would go a long way to reducing such disruptive

individualistic behaviour, because it requires a collective response and it reinforces the

collective response by going back and forth with the teacher multiple times.