1  

Teaching Observation for Clayton Benjamin Course: ENC 1101 Classroom: HPA1 Room 207 Date: Monday, September 22, 2014 Time: 12:30 to 1:20 Observation conducted by: Dr. Kevin Roozen I entered Clayton’s classroom a few minutes late due to some difficulty locating his classroom in the HPA 1 building. By the time I arrived, Clayton was providing his students with an overview of the various tasks they would be doing for the remainder of Week 6. The information Clayton has projected onto the large screen at the front of the room was clearly written and well organized. Following the brief overview, Clayton invited his students to arrange themselves into small groups to talk for five to seven minutes about the Discourse Communities they are investigating and any challenges they were encountering. Clayton’s classroom is small, with a large table in the center that takes occupies the majority of the space, so the students didn’t have much room to maneuver as they organized themselves into groups. They eventually managed to arrange themselves into four groups of four students each and began to talk with one another about their selected Discourse Communities. Clayton had written some guidelines for their discussions on the whiteboard, and the students frequently referred to them as they talked. The two groups that I could overhear the most clearly focused most of their conversation on how to identify participants to interview and the kinds of interview questions they could ask that would elicit information relevant to Swales’ six characteristics of a Discourse Community. As the groups of students talked, Clayton circulated from group to group, pausing briefly to listen in on their conversations, ask and answer questions, and encourage the quieter students to participate in the discussion. Based on these interactions with the small groups, it was clear that Clayton had developed a strong rapport with the students in the class. Clayton closed this activity by asking the students if they had any questions they would like to ask the class as a whole. One student raised his hand, and when Clayton called on him, he asked if there was any kind of limitation on the kinds of Discourse Communities that they could study. Clayton invited other students to weigh in, and a few commented that access to members of the Discourse Community and its activities seemed like key things to consider. Clayton offered that the students

  2  

would not want to investigate Discourse Communities mainly made up of minors or any other kind of “vulnerable populations.” Clayton then transitioned the students to the main activity he had planned for the class meeting, an analysis of a brief documentary he had students watch prior to coming to today’s class. The documentary focused on the contrast between how “art” is defined and valued by expert art critics and everyday people. Clayton opened this activity by inviting the students to weigh in with their “likes” and “dislikes” of the documentary. This proved to be an effective pedagogical move, and over the next fifteen minutes of class each of the sixteen students present offered a comment and participated in the discussion. Having occasioned a lively discussion, Clayton then moved students into a focused analysis of the two groups represented in the video using Swales’ six characteristics of a Discourse Community as an analytic lens. Clayton divided the class in half and assigned one half the art critics and the other half the everyday people featured in the documentary. Clayton asked each portion of the class to use Swales’ characteristics to talk about these Community’s goals, methods of intercommunication, participatory mechanisms, genres, lexis, and range of expertise. From what I overheard, the discussions were lively and animated. When it seemed like a portion of the class encountered trouble talking in detail about one of Swales’ characteristics, Clayton guided their analysis back on a productive track by asking some guiding questions about the documentary or by inviting students to elaborate further on their initial insights. When the groups’ conversations seemed to lag a bit, Clayton invited each half of the class to articulate the high points of their analysis. As they did so, Clayton stood at the whiteboard and made notes for each of Swales’ characteristics. From what I could tell, the students found this to be very helpful, and all but three students copied the notes Clayton jotted on the whiteboard. The groups’ comments were detailed and insightful, and definitely relevant to Swales’ commentary on the key features of Discourse Communities. Even more importantly, though, the students were very engaged in this activity, and it sustained their attention for another ten minutes or so. I had thought the discussion of the documentary might end with the class outlining the key features of each Discourse Community, but, as Clayton informed the students, outlining the six characteristics was only the very first step in understanding how Discourse Communities functioned and what they valued. Clayton then directed the students to take the next step of working from the notes on the whiteboard to determining what each group featured in the documentary valued. It took a few minutes of awkward silence in each group before the students slowly started to talk their way through how each Community’s goals, methods of intercommunication, participatory mechanisms, genres, lexis, and range of expertise reflected its core values. Again, I found that the students’ discussions were interesting and insightful, especially one group of students that started talking about the issues of power at the heart of the issue of which

  3  

group’s opinions about art were valued more. As before, when the discussions started to wane a bit, Clayton directed their attention to the whiteboard and invited the groups to offer the highlights of their conversations. The students talked in detail about the tension between the values of these two Discourse Communities as they offered comments about what “art,” especially “good art”, was for each Community and what was at stake with each Community’s definition. With the class period drawing to a close, Clayton asked the students to think about the Discourse Communities that they had chosen to examine for the major writing task they were working on and to consider how their analysis and discussion of the documentary could help them interrogate the issues of power that arise within them. Although only a few minutes remained of the class meeting, the students started talking within their groups about the issues of power they saw circulating in the Communities they had chosen. With three minutes remaining in the class period, Clayton reminded students about what they needed to do for the remaining two classes of Week 6, asked them to turn in the “Friday memo & discussion” documents they had written over the weekend based on last Friday’s class, and then dismissed them. I had wanted to talk with Clayton immediately after the class ended, but my pen had leaked all over my hand and I had inadvertently gotten ink all over my face, so I went in search of a water fountain to wash up. When I returned to the classroom, Clayton had already departed. As I walked back to my office in Colbourn and reflected on Clayton’s class, it struck me how difficult it would be to say enough good things about the teaching I saw. Clayton’s decision to use the documentary to get students engaged with the Swales reading was a very good one, and I thought that the students’ analyses of the documentary were very productive. My sense was that the documentary activity was very well designed and well planned, and that the students were definitely energized and engaged with it over an extended period of time. Clearly, Clayton has a keen sense for creating and planning activities that enhance student learning. Sincerely, Dr. Kevin Roozen

  4