Walkthrough Observer

I am sitting idle right now in the computer lab of a school. No, I haven't decided to return to school in my thirties, neither to educate nor to learn. Let's say, I'm here because of one of the many voluntold activities we do in our small community. Surprisingly, it is one of the few such activities that I instantly liked from the beginning.

I am a Walkthrough Observer of a school in my town. I visit it at least once a month and observe and evaluate three classes. My job is to observe the learners, their engagement and overall behaviour. Moreover, I also observe the environment and culture of the individual classes and school in general.

I quietly go inside the classroom from the backdoor, seat myself on a back bench and observe. Sometimes, I enjoy having a refresher on long-forgotten topics that I last studied only in school. I feel nostalgic about the academic setup and possibly like it there because this time, I don't have to worry about exams and assignments while attending school. 😆

I don't go there to inspect the teachers, nor do I mention anything about them in my notes, as I'm not qualified to review an educationist. But I would secretly admit here that I love to quietly perform kinesics on them. Generally, experienced teachers continue to teach in a confident and doughty manner, but sometimes, new-in-the-profession are befuddled, and some even get demented in my presence—possibly thinking I'm evaluating their performance and would cause rubble in their professional course, which I'm not allowed to do by the authorities that send me for this task. I feel bad for making them nervous, but at the same time, the devil in me is lowkey amused by the superficial power they seem to think I have.

Anyhoo, today I observed grade 7 English and grade 8 Urdu periods. The Urdu lesson was quite interactive — interjections/exclamations (حروف فجایہ) were being taught. I had almost forgotten the parts of speech terms in Urdu and it felt good to go through them again.

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In the empty computer lab, I wrote my observations in the forms and waited for the students to come. An hour passed but the lab remained silent. Apparently, that day teachers decided to conduct the labs in respective classrooms on the board. I noticed the grade 1 teacher drawing images of the toolbar of Microsoft Paint and students copying it in their notebooks. I waited for something more meaningful but the whole 45 minutes were spent perfecting the images. None of the students knew what and why they were doing. The teacher didn't feel it necessary to demonstrate it on the computer, nor did she try to explain anything theoretically.

Now, as mentioned before, I'm not authorized to evaluate a teacher, but who's at fault there? Clearly, not the students as they wished and requested to go to the lab to which the teacher paid no attention. I can't even blame the system, lab and its equipment. Everything was perfect and functional.

I carefully wrote my feedback explaining how the lesson could have been more fruitful if it had been demonstrated on the computer and students had been given a hands-on experience.

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As a Walkthrough Observer, I'm told to assess the classroom culture and students' engagement according to Bloom's Taxonomy —a hierarchical framework which inculcates higher-order thinking skills by categorizing the levels of cognitive understanding.

^source

While in Urdu and English classes, I felt the students were at an advanced level of understanding, but the Computer students wouldn't pass the first level if it's continued to be delivered like that. If it was the early 2000s, it would have been possible that a grade 1 student couldn't handle a computer, but nowadays, the younger generation excels at technology.

It wasn't just grade 1, during my last visit, something similar was happening in grade 6. I have reported my thoughts on the matter. Let's see what steps authorities take, that is, if they think of it as a "problem" in the first place. Alas, third world problems!