One of the valuable opportunities that my university was and still providing me with is the classroom observations at Omar Al Mukhtar Educational Center. My first chance of observing a class with a cooperating teacher at school was in the Practicum course which required 40 observation sessions along with their weekly journals. My instructor assigned a grade 8 section to be the case I'm going to observe for a couple of months. During these months, I was able to be the teacher's and students' shadow and adapt to their lifestyle and schedule at school. It even gave me the opportunity to go back in time to when I was a student at school and my teacher would come to class with another teacher with him/her to observe us (we usually kept our necks turned around toward her to see what she did during the session). My experience in observations was really successful and my senior project which was a portfolio that summarized all this experience proved this success.
This semester, I was given the chance to observe the same class again but this time once every week. the students haven't changed from last semester. It gave me a great feeling of joy when I first reentered the class and they expressed how much they missed me. Such an experience gave me the opportunity to be introduced to a school's real context and not just learn about it in my courses.
Following is a picture of me while teaching grade 8 class in my practicum course with my cooperating teacher observing the session.
Actually, while typing this post I remembered that I have a journal to finalize. I have to go!
