This article describes how students in an urban Catholic school draw on racial and religious categories to construct classroom-specific identities during coursework. When students engage with each other in classroom discussions, they use broadly circulating, institutional, and event-level categories to position one another, and in doing so…

It has been theorized that contextual tasks support student engagement and sense making. Yet, contradictory ideas exist about the role of these tasks in lessons, and further research is needed to explore how classroom interactions can help achieve their intended purposes. Through video observation of lessons in three eighth-grade classrooms using…

VIC is a computer program for the analysis of verbal interaction category systems, especially the Flanders interaction analysis system. The observer codes verbal behavior on coding sheets for later machine scoring. A matrix is produced by the program showing the number and percentages of times that a particular cell describes classroom behavior.…

Written from the perspective of the classroom teacher as novice supervisor, this paper describes two cycles of clinical supervision involving teaching peers in an elementary public school. A discussion is presented on the quality of the efforts and accuracy of the perceptions of the beginning supervisor. Some constants that may be thought of as…

The study reported here analyzed the interaction performance of instructional supervisors as they conducted postobservation conferences with teachers. Seven supervisor-teacher pairs consisting of varying combinations of experienced, beginning, and novice teachers and supervisors were examined, to determine status indicators such as jargon use,…

The object of this research was to establish a reliable test battery to determine probable future success for those persons who wish to be trained as expert classroom observers. The focus of this investigation was to predict coding performance. This report presents the findings of a replication of an earlier study that indicated that coder…

Use of the Teaching Strategies Observation Differential (TSOD), a 10-category system for observing and classifying teacher classroom behavior, is discussed as it relates to training preservice elementary school science teachers. Contends that skill in the use of TSOD helps preservice teachers become more effective in bringing about desired pupil…

The rationale of the Observation Schedule and Record (OScAR) is described, and research is reported to show the extent to which the form fulfills its purposes. In order to provide objective, reliable, and valid information about the teaching process, this classroom observation schedule is used to record the frequency of occurrence of 42 teacher…