Coaching Session - Who's Engaged?

I recently completed a couple of classroom observations with student teachers who had identified student engagement as one of their personal learning goals on the action plan for the observed lesson. We agreed I would collect data on student engagement at five-minute intervals using an annotated seating chart.

Here's the diagram from one of the classes. Letters "A" through "H" mark students who I judged were not on task at at least some point during the five minute time index of the survey.

What do you notice? What questions do you have?

Here's the diagram from another class at a different school. The seating arrangement shifted mid-lesson when students began to work in pairs; these pairings are indicated as bolded connections on the diagram. 

Again, letters "A" through "H" mark students who were not on task at that time index of the survey. You can see a chronicle of this lesson below the chart.

If it's not graded, I won't do it

One task all faculty at GVSU are asked to do every February is prepare an annual Faculty Activity Report (FAR). This entails compiling a complete list of our efforts for the past calendar year in the areas of teaching, scholarship, and service.

Our procedures are a bit more involved than this...

One piece of our FAR includes a reflection on trends we have noticed in our student evaluations of instruction. A colleague who had read my teaching reflection invited me to share the following in the hope that others seeking to make sense of and respond to student evaluations of instruction might find it useful.

How Math Saved Bedtime

(This post was inspired by @Trianglemancsd's blog Talking Math with Kids.)

The bedtime routine at our house begins at 7:30. We have a chart showing the steps: take a vitamin, go potty, brush teeth, put PJs on, read three books, go to sleep. Lately, the middle three steps have evolved into a serious power struggle with my four year old. He whines, complains, drags his feet, says he's too tired... and the resulting cajoling amounts to leading a horse to water and finding that it stubbornly will not take a drink.

From https://www.babysleepsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/coverears.jpg

After a particularly frustrating night, I happened to notice the potty / brush his teeth / change into PJs sequence had taken 24 minutes. This gave me an idea. I went downstairs and found a piece of black construction paper and a white crayon. I quickly constructed the axes for a simple bar chart, extending the vertical scale up to an optimistic 25 minutes, and sketched the horizontal scale that would hold the days of the week.