Proposed Methodology

I will be conducting classrooms observations in KIPP to see how teaching methods affect student engagement. I wanted to observe two classes of different fields (STEM and Humanities) in order to get an understanding of the variety of teaching methods given how different classroom dynamics in these subjects could be very different. Because freshman classes are unlike sophomore, junior, or senior classes, all the classes I will be observing consist of freshman students in order to control this variable. While I initially planed to observe six classes per subject, my current data set consists of five observations per class, totaling 10 observations for the biology and english class. I will count the number of actively engaged, passively engaged, passively disengaged, and actively disruptive students every 2 minutes, according to the definitions I have made for each of these categories. I will also record the duration of the classroom activity the students are involved in (ie teacher lecture: 10:15-10:40, student presentations: 11:40-11:50, group work: 12:30-12:45), as well as any other instances of teacher-to-student interactions (ie cold call: 11:30, discussion: 9:38-9:40, teacher checking homework, do now, etc).