Memo #3

Over the past few weeks I've had the opportunity to observe my friend, James David Salisbury, in his middle school classroom at the Nathanael Greene Middle School.  He is an English teacher that spans 6^th grade to 8^th grade, and also has the opportunity to teach an accelerated 8^th grade class.  Before observing his class I had a number of questions that I wanted to ask him about how he taught.

What do you to present your writing assignments to the class?

When you are trying to learn the class a new writing technique or integrating the 5-paragraph essay into their academics, what steps do you take?

How do you keep control of your class?

What makes your students take note of your lessons? (How do you make yourself memorable?)

With 45 minutes to 1 hour, how do you teach everything you need to teach them?

Each day before the students came into class, he would give them writing prompts to write about in their Writer’s Notebook.   Each prompt was matched with one of the DOKs and related to whatever book the students were reading that week.  He gave the students 10 minutes to write as much as they could, and then they could share whatever thoughts they had for 5 minutes.  As I observed him during that process, he would seem to talk to the students as they wrote.  He would talk to his students about what they had for lunch or other classes they may have told him about—and most of the time his back-and-forth comments revolved back around to the writing prompt on the board.  And even during the sharing portion as he gave each student a turn to talk he would not specifically limit the discussion to the ideas in their notebook.  He would bring the topic to a kind of life by related it back to his students daily lives.  He got to know his students and used that to teach his lesson.

Moving through the next half hour of his class, JD’s class became a bit rowdy because of the sharing activity.  To control the crowd, he verbally acknowledged their necessity to calm down and move on.  And instead of repeating himself, he stood in the middle of class with his finger to his lips in silence.  I had learned in a previous SED class that silence is louder than words to your students, especially when they can see you being active a moment prior.  When they simmered down, he asked why exactly he might have had his students write about the prompt on the board.  Some students snickered as if it were obvious, others questioned why, and others stayed silent.  One girl raised her hand almost immediately and referenced a lesson JD had taught them from weeks prior.  She commented on how he had them remember it with a sort of antic he pulled in class that got them to memorize it and pondered whether or not their current prompt had anything to do with that weeks passed lesson.  Long story short, she was right.  And JD moved the class on by relating the humor he implanted in their previous lesson to the boisterousness of their current writing prompt and what they shared.

The class moved on and JD seemed to reenact his antics with the class as he had them writing a draft for a debate they would have a week from that time.  As they wrote, he did not stay silent with Wait Time but instead spoke with the class about their assignment, relating it first to their lessons from weeks passed, to their written prompt, to their actual lives (what the students did in other classes that they shared with JD, what he had experienced with them personally, what they did as hobbies that happened to relate to the current assignment).  The class ended, but each student that left was still talking about the class they just had with JD.  Some were talking about what to do to prepare for the debate a week from then, others were reenacting the antics and jokes JD had in class, and others were asking what the other wrote for their assignment.

Now as I observed JD’s class, I can’t say that he was a strict teacher.  The way he handled his class and the way the students took the opportunity to speak in class whenever given the chance, I suspect that his class is one that students generally enjoy.  If I had to describe his teaching style, I would call it organic.  JD told me earlier on that while he did have written and mapped out lesson plans for his classes, he generally sat down before a class and gathered his thoughts into these categories:  What do I need to teach them and what idea do I want them to take away at the end of the day?  He has a general idea of what his day-to-day lessons will consist of, and molds the activeness of his students and the DOK into his activities.  With a hint of humor that he methodically times out, he climbs the lesson with his students and makes sure they remember how it feels to finally reach the objective of the day with his humor.  Needless to say, he makes sure his students remember the essential components of his lessons, but he also makes sure they’re not being tossed straight into the lesson without first going through it with them. 

While JD wasn't able to answer all my questions personally nor with his lessons, the questions seemed to be answered by what he did with his students.  Whether or not he was aware of it, he has a unique teaching style that his students are influenced by and utilize.