On October 30th, a select few teachers were chosen to shadow one of their students for a day in order to get a feel for what it is like to be a student at BHS and to see how other teachers run their classrooms. Their classes had a substitute teacher for the day while they went to a variety of classes and viewed other teachers’ methods of teaching and how students behave during class from a different perspective. The following day, there was a debriefing session where they discussed their experiences and how it helped the teachers.
This experience and debriefing session for the teachers involved was run by Mrs. Church, the secondary staff instructional coach. All teachers were invited to shadow a student but since it required teachers to not be in class for two days, only a few staff participated. Mrs. Blackwell, who teaches AP World History and AP European History, helped give more entail into what this experience was like by describing what her day looked like. “My understanding of the shadow experience was that we participated in the classes with our students as much as we could. We did not want to disrupt the flow of the classroom, so it depended on what was scheduled for each class as to how much participation we could do as part of the experience.” The teachers also experienced navigating the halls during passing time, and how different teachers organize their classrooms, like how they set up their Schoology page, and the workload they give.
Blackwell spent the day with junior Jessie Burns, whom she selected herself. Blackwell explains why she chose Burns. “I chose Jessie Burns because we have a good rapport with each other, and I wanted to shadow a junior who is currently in my class to get an idea of what many of my students experience in a day.” She also explained that she asked Burns for permission as well as talked to her parents to let them know what was going on and what the experience was about.
Blackwells says she learned a lot from her experience. “I learned that we ask a lot of students, switching subjects every hour is hard and we expect students to know and remember different procedures and skill sets for each subject.” This is an important thing for teachers to understand because it can be hard for a high school student to be in a class like Spanish, then go straight to Math while still in the Spanish mindset. She also explains how a lot of amazing things go on in our building and that classes now are more engaging than they were when she was in school.
All of these things as well as the teachers’ takeaways were discussed on the 31st. Blackwell describes that “The focus was on the positive impacts and how we can use the experience to improve our understanding and practice as educators.” She also notes, “The experience made me more mindful about being clear about expectations and intentions with what I do in my classes.” Overall, teachers being able to shadow students for a day is successful because it allows them to be more mindful of how they run their classes, get to know the school better, as well as build empathy for the students and understand that having 6 different skill sets and expectations for six different classes can be stressful.
