What role does observation of students play in your capacity to understand student’s developmental pathways/trajectory? Consider both the broad developmental progressions and specific progressions within your area of speciality.
Observing students within the classroom can let us get to know them on a psychological level. Noticing student’s typical behaviors and habits can tell us how they fit in with their classmates and how they may not fit in with their peers. We can also tell from observations how they are fitting in with the classroom environment they are being provided with. Certain students thrive in specific environments or with certain types of assignments. While everyone learns different, creating an environment where students of all different learning styles can thrive is crucial. Keeping an open mind about what your students may or may not need within the classroom, and watching their habits to determine this, will help students grow academically and developmentally.
When observing students in their learning environments and picking up on their habits, we as teachers can create a baseline of who they are as people. Learning who your students are as humans is a good way to start creating an environment where they can thrive as well as developing a strong relationship with them so you can be a good support system for them. From there, we can adjust our teaching methods and behaviors towards the students to help them improve academically and developmentally. As we start adjusting these aspects little by little, we can observe how their habits change and decide if what we are changing is helping or hurting their progress.
Through these observations, we can also see how each of the developmental categories are progressing and see if any particular students may need more support in one category or another. Because of the previous work we have done to get to know how they work as humans and what way they best learn, we can take that knowledge and use it to help enforce developmental traits they are good at, encourage new developmental traits and habits that they may be lacking, and provide opportunities for them to excel at traits that they are already above the norm at. For example, if one of my students is in 8th grade and is still having trouble understanding how to read notes on a staff, I would provide differentiation as best as I could and give them a double dose of learning in the learning style that they succeed at the most. However, if another student of mine is in 8th grade and learns scales fairly easily and has the theoretical knowledge to use when learning new scales, I would provide them with solo repertoire that extends that knowledge by being in many different keys or having little to no tonal center. Observing each student in the classroom can give us insider knowledge on what students are struggling with and how to help them further their learning the best way we can.
