Michelle Watson

LSEE 308

John Lee

SB Middle School Case Study

Forward

There is a stigma towards the years one spends in middle school. Those are the in-

between years that can either be some of the most memorable or the most traumatizing. For me,

it was the latter. It was a mix of the social and educational aspects, the cruelness from one I

trusted the most and the teacher that let me down. The moment I left middle school, I told myself

that I would never step foot in a middle school again. To my surprise, I was placed in the middle

school this semester for fieldwork.

This semester I went to a 7th grade classroom and a 6th grade classroom to do my tutoring

practicum. For this case study, I decided to compare the difference between the 6th grade class

and 7th grade class’s student engagement, participation, and understanding of material taught.

There I stood at 8:40 A.M. on September 18, 2018, in front of SB Middle School. My

heart was racing, I had lost feeling in my legs, and was tensed up everywhere else. Nonetheless, I

walked in with my fellow classmates to the 7th grade classroom, the first classroom of the week.

The teacher, Ms. T stood in front of the class and welcomed us as we introduced ourselves to the

students. As I looked around, I noticed that there were seven groups of four tables where the

students were to sit except for the seventh one in the back of the room. That’s about twenty-four

students that we were to help. I was nervous, but as I looked around the classroom, the four fish

tanks I saw with a snake in each of them somehow calmed me down. As the teacher moved on to

her lesson, I looked around at the students and saw that they seemed to be enjoying the lesson. It

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was an intro hands-on lesson about finding the circumference of a cylinder. Ms. T asked the

students to take a piece of string and wrap it around something circular and then measure the

length of the part(s) of the string that made it around the circular object to find the

circumference. After finding the circumference, the students were to write down the

measurement under the circumference column on a worksheet they had to fill out. The next step

was to find the diameter of the circular object and measure the string the same way on a ruler and

then write it down in the diameter column. The students seemed to have the most fun in finding

things to wrap the string around such as their friend’s head or ankle. The part they didn’t seem to

enjoy was working out the equation on the worksheet (circumference over diameter). I noticed

that a lot of the students would switch the two around and then move on to the next thing that

they could measure. That’s when I first interacted with Student S; her hair was tied half up, she

wore glasses, and seemed to be able to socialize and simultaneously get her work done. I asked

the student why she would write the equation that way and she replied with an “I don’t know”

and moved on. This routine went on until the bell rang to mark the end of first period. Then, that

was it; that was the first day of tutoring practicum in the middle school. It wasn’t as bad as I

thought it was going to be, but I knew I still had to go several more times before I got

comfortable. I also knew that I had to figure out more ways to guide the students into

understanding how and why what they were learning worked.

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 Day two of week one was in a 6th grade classroom with the teacher Mr. P. Walking into

his classroom, I felt slightly more at ease than I did walking into Mrs. T’s classroom. I’m not

sure if it was because there were less students or if it was the atmosphere of the classroom itself.

It was a colorful classroom filled with inspirational quotes that encouraged self confidence and

teamwork. There were six table groups of four with one long table in the back. Each table group

of four had three students except the one table group had two students and the one table group

that was left empty. Their lesson of the day was to find the greatest number of combinations in

some word problems. To work out the problem, the students were to find the Greatest Common

Factors (GCF). An example problem included finding the greatest number of combinations of 24

daisies and 32 roses. The students would draw a column for daisies, a column for roses, and a

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column for number of combinations. In each column, they would find GCF of each number in

multiplication form. Next, they would circle the ones that matched. The smaller number of the

two multiplied that matched would be the number of combinations, which they would put in the

third column. Some of the students I noticed would circle the bigger number of the two

multiplied as the number of combinations. That’s when I first interacted with Student L; her red

hair was down, she seemed shy, and was willing to try to work out the problem without any

words to say. When I asked the student why she did that, she replied “I don’t know”. Before I

could say anything, Mr. P went through the problem on the board with the class. He would ask

students what they did and why they decided to make certain choices. There were several hands

raised, ready to participate. Then, just as it did on Tuesday, the bell rang. It was time for us tutors

to go. I knew that I would need to figure out how to explain without giving an answer to the

students.

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7th grade:

On October 23, 2018,

Top left picture:

Student S told me, “I don’t know how long the ruler on the page is measuring. Isn’t it like

one inch or something?”. I suggested that she look at the ruler on the page and to see how

many sections she could break one inch into. With this, she was able to break it down into

four sections and match that additional section after one inch with one of the four sections or

¼. The rest of the problem, the teacher went over with the students on the white board and

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many students wrote down what Ms. T wrote down. This problem was solved using the

abstract form for the most part but the representational form when dealing with the picture of

the ruler. The students mostly socialized or doodled on their papers.

Top right picture:

Student S said to her tablemates and me, “I got this. I wear glasses. I’m smart”. What I

found out was that Student S was right, she was able to do the problem. She had used what

she learned from previous problems to solve it. However, when I looked at her page, she had

written 1.5(1ft) = 1.5 ft and that didn’t fit in with what the problem was asking. When I

asked her why she wrote that there, she shrugged and replied, “I don’t know” and then turned

around to talk to her friends. I’m not entirely sure but I think she might have written it down

without thinking about it after she converted 2 inches to 1.5 ft. Perhaps this was another case

of zombie mode? This problem was solved using the abstract form. The students mostly

socialized or doodled on their papers.

Bottom picture:

Student S asked me, “Why do you use certain numbers in the problem? Like, how do you

know why number to put where to make bigger?”. I told her to look at the two squares and to

see which one matches up with the same side equivalently and that’s how she would know.

The class was taught to use an equation, the abstract way, or as we like to call it, zombie

mode. Y= KX. K would equal the scale being used. She, along with other students followed

the equation the teacher gave and would sometimes not write anything down until the teacher

went over the problem on the board with hopes of class participation. Not many students

raised their hands to participate. This problem was mostly solved using the abstract form

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 except for when the representational form was used compare the two squares. The students

mostly doodled or socialized.

On October 30,2018,

Student S thought out loud, “Your friend’s scale is Y=1/12 X. Y is the distance on the

scale drawing and X is the actual distance in feet. So, I like plug in 180 feet to where X is right?”

This showed me that Student S knew part of the problem. She understood how to find the scale

drawing size on ‘Your friend’ but had some troubles with figuring out how to find ‘Your’ scale

size. When we got to that part, she said that she didn’t know what to do. I asked her to look at the

graph to figure out how many inches she would get equivalent to how many feet she would get

by following the plotted line and to see if there was a pattern. The students had covered graphing

in previous lesson(s), so I hoped that she could see where I was leading her. She knew that the X

numbers came first in the coordinates and the Y came second. She told me that every 1 inch,

there were 10 feet. At this point, the Ms. T worked out the rest of the problem with the students

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on the white board. Not many students raised their hands. Instead, many students around me

waited until Ms. T wrote down the process and copied it down. This problem was solved using

the abstract form for the most part and the representational form for dealing with the graph. The

students mostly socialized or doodled.

6th grade:

On October 18,2018,

Left side picture:

Student L got confused but then understood. She would add or subtract the number on the

X side of the problem to the whole of each side of the symbols. I explained to her that she

was to subtract or add that number from that number alone and from the other side to make

the sides even or to move it over to the other side. This explanation seemed to make sense to

her. She was able to finish the worksheet and participate in explanations and answers when

Mr. P went over the problems on the white board with the class. These problems were solved

in an abstract way with using the inverse operation but with the representational part drawn

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out in graph form. The students wouldn’t talk much with each other about the problem unless

they were really confused.

Right side picture:

Mr. P asked the students what the symbols that he drew on the board meant. Students

would raise their hands to explain what the symbols were and when they would use it in the

problems they had done. The students had learned about these symbols in previous lesson(s).

On November 1, 2018,

Left side picture:

Student L didn’t know at first that there were sections to draw involved such as ¼ of the

way but then realized it on her own. She got stuck on the problem after drawing the home

and the museum on two different ends of a line and a half way point. She used what she

knew from the problem to draw these. When I asked her how she would show that the

museum was ¾ of the way from home like the problem said, she put markings in the half

way point of each half of the way and wrote ¼, under each marking on the line adding up to

a total of 4/4. She realized this wasn’t right, so she erased those and divided the line up into
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sections with markings of ¼, 2/4, and ¾ (museum spot). Then, she cut each section in half

and added more markings. I asked her what those would be if they were half of ¼ and she

said 1/8. With this, she marked each one as 1/8 so that the museum spot would be 6/8 and

that the half way point would be 3/8 as her answer. The students wouldn’t discuss the

problem with their peers unless they were really confused.

Right side picture:

Mr. P worked through the problems with the students’ participation of telling him what

steps to take and what to draw after they had a chance to work the problem out themselves.

The students could have multiplied the numbers since they had covered multiplying fractions

already but instead, they took the representational approach to solve the problem.

Bottom picture:

Student L knew to find the area she would have to multiply the length times the width

because previous lesson(s) showed her that with filling a square with boxes. She had no

trouble with this problem. She multiplied the two fractions as she had practiced before and

then simplified her answer as she had practiced before as well. This problem was solved by

the abstract approach for the multiplication but the representational approach in the sense of

the picture provided. The students wouldn’t discuss the problem with their peers unless they

were really confused.

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On November 8,2018,

Student L mostly understood how to do the problems. When she got confused, she would

stop to think about it and then realize where she went wrong. The students had learned two

ways of how to do these problems. Student L was able to eventually do both ways (way 1 is

the bottom picture and way 2 is the top right picture). Way number 1 has three steps. The

first step is to multiply both the whole numbers. The second step is to multiply the fraction

from the mixed number with the other whole number. The third step is to add the sums of

step one and two to get the answer. Way number 2 uses the distributive property that the

students had previously learned. The mixed number is broken up into the whole number plus

the fraction with a parenthesis around the front and back ends and is being multiplied by the

other whole number on the outside. Student L used the steps that she was taught and her

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previous knowledge of how to multiply fractions to solve these problems. She preferred to

use way number 1 because it was what the teacher went over first. These problems were

solved using the abstract approach but were coupled with a fun matching aspect of the

worksheet. The students wouldn’t discuss the problem with their peers unless they were

really confused.

From what I have seen in the two classrooms this semester, the 6th grade classroom has

more student engagement and participation than the 7th grade classroom. It could be that Mr.

P encourages his students to ask questions, tries to give fun worksheets that he thinks the

students might be interested in and doesn’t yell at his students. This might make the students

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more comfortable and feel as if they are in a safe zone. It could be that Ms. T tells us tutors

what the students do and don’t do in front of the students or that the problems that she has

the students work on are not that appealing to the students. These reasons would be implying

that student engagement and participation is all in response to the teacher. On the other hand,

if it was all on the students themselves, the outcome might also be because the students are in

an awkward time in life and/or that they are shy in front of us tutors, love to socialize, or that

they don’t care about the information they are learning in 7th grade. It could also be because

the students in the 6th grade class are just more willing to try, like to focus on the problem

themselves, or that there are less students that they are around that makes it more

comfortable. The truth is, the factors for student engagement and participation are probably a

mix of what comes from the teacher and what comes from the students. The causes may not

be known for sure, but what we do know is that Mr. P’s class is more engaged and participate

more than Ms. T’s class. This experience has helped me to get over my personal trauma from

middle school and taught me to find ways of teaching my students in a way that they can

enjoy. It has also taught me to show different ways of solving those types of problems so that

I can encourage the students to find a way that makes sense to them as to avoid zombie

mode. We will just have to wait and see what happens.

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