Separate from
my detailed classroom conversations and interview field notes, this journaling process served as a personal reflection on my role as the facilitator of the group, as well as my interpretation of the school environment as related to my prior experience.
While the
conversation would be broad, the agenda should be narrow and focus on three immediate needs: 1) radically improving the quality of candidates coming to the field; 2) identifying the specific content of coursework necessary to improve teacher knowledge; and 3) and
detailing the practical experiences that new teachers need in order to ensure they are effective in the types of
classroom contexts in which they plan to teach.
We trained ourselves as observers to reliably document instruction in the lessons we observed based on our modification of Newmann «s assessment of authentic instruction.313 We recorded what we saw and heard on an observation form that included two main sections: 1) basic information about the context,
details of the lesson, how class time was used, how students were organized for instruction and learning, the kinds of technology used during the lesson, and a description of any positive or negative features in the
classroom; and 2) assessments of instruction using four of Newmann's five standards of authentic instruction: higher order thinking, deep knowledge, substantive
conversation, and connection to the world beyond the
classroom.