Preliminary Data

The first day of observations gave me insight into how KIPP classrooms work, how teachers interact with their students and run their classes, and how students behave. While it did not give me a full view of all the different (or many) activities, it allowed me to see how the first five minutes of class are spent, the general mood and energy level of the students, how talkative, disruptive, or attentive the students are, and some of the teaching methods and activities the students took part in. This data did begin to answer my inquiry, but in order to get more reliable data, I needed to go observe the classes for a longer time in order to get a broader perspective of the various activities that the teachers utilize. I also wanted to record more observations from independent work days, whole-classroom activities such as reading aloud, and how the students behave when technology is used for most of the class time.