A story of classroom environment

                I arrived at Portsmouth High School with a good idea of what to expect. It was a fairly large building of mostly brick and concrete construction. I realized I did not have any idea where I should park, so I picked a spot only to discover I made the wrong choice upon checking in at the main office. My contact met me and showed me to the first class I would be observing.

                It was an AP Psychology class. The room contained a lot of the typical furniture: a teacher’s desk, student desks, a couple small tables, a pair of filing cabinets, and a supply closet. The student desks were arranged in two rows in a semicircle configuration, amphitheater style. The teacher’s desk was near the corner of the room and would be left mostly unused throughout the class as the teacher mostly moved around the “stage” area of the amphitheater. A digital projector was attached to the ceiling. Unlike some classrooms, there were no computers in the room other than the teacher’s laptop.

                The more interesting parts of the room were on the walls. There were typical classroom items like the whiteboard, shelves with books, maps of Asia and Central America, a United States demographic map, a clock, and cork bulletin boards. But these were boring. Slightly more interesting were the various small framed history related photographs/posters, like Lee Teter’s Reflections. The objects my eyes were most drawn to were the painted portraits of The Joker and Harley Quinn above the whiteboard. I wondered if these were made by a student and given to the teacher. The other most eye catching object was a full-sized medieval armet helm on the shelf near the books. It was a nice-looking replica, though I suspected it was not student-made and constructed from acrylic or resin, not steel.

                Other than the handful of oddities in the room this was a familiar, and thus comfortable, classroom environment. The same could be said for what I saw of the entire school. It was larger, but similar to the one I attended twelve to sixteen years ago. This was probably because the majority of their construction was fairly recent and utilitarian compared to Nathanael Greene Middle School, which I assume is older with a more ornate exterior and interior.

                I had taken a seat in one of the student desks at the end of the semicircle before the students started to arrive. There were only thirteen of them, eight female and five male. It was not a very diverse group, as only one student appeared to be Latino while the rest were white. It being Portsmouth, it was safe to assume they were mostly from middle-class families. The only disability, which sounds like too strong a word, that could be identified among them were vision problems when a few of them had to move up to better see the white on grey (a choice the teacher regretted) PowerPoint slides. The teacher himself was white, and probably middle-class class too.

                The students were talking to each other a lot as they settled in, but were not out of control and the teacher was unconcerned. Some of their conversations were even about the class, and the teacher was able quiet them down quickly since it was time for a quiz. The students took a short multiple choice quiz and once they finished, the teacher had them exchange quizzes and began to go over it. The teacher called on a student to read the question and the answer on the quiz they had, he would tell them the correct answer.

                Up to this point the class was everything I had expected it to be, but here was where things changed. Many of the answers the students had were wrong, but, unsolicited, the students were asking why the answer was wrong and explaining to each other why. A particular point of confusion was the concept of negative reinforcement, but the students with a better grasp on it were able to help the others. This kind of interaction continued throughout the remainder of the class, with the teacher asking short, open-ended questions and letting the students discuss them. Each student sometimes spoke for over a minute at a time. This teacher had control of the class, but let the students dominate the time.

                The environment seemed ideal and it was clear the students were fully engaged and had a good relationship with their teacher. That is not to say it was perfect. Though they were paying attention, four of the five male students did not participate much in the class discussion, so the female students overwhelmingly dominated class time. The students were courteous, allowing one another to speak often without being prompted or called upon, but this was partially a result of the small class size. It would be difficult to be so informal in a class with twenty-five or more students.

                As the class closed, the teacher reminded the students of an assignment where they were to plan a way to solve a theoretical problem in the school cafeteria through the use of conditioning. After the class ended and I was leaving, I was a little surprised with how great of an environment that teacher created in his class. This classroom was similar to some of the better college courses I have taken and I would have enjoyed being in this class in high school. However I had to temper my enthusiasm, as this was the accomplishment of just one teacher with an AP class, meaning all these students likely exceeded the expectations of the school. I was right in my assumption, as the teacher in the next class I visited had not cultivated the same impressive environment. Still, even with my small sample size, I think most of the students like the school and receive a better than average education in it.