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.…

This paper discusses the supervisory use of one observational system -- Observation Schedule and Record, Form 5V (OScAR 5V). OScAR 5V refers to a series of observation schedules to develop techniques for obtaining an objective, quantitative record of observed classroom behavior that could be scored on dimensions of teacher behavior. Under this…

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,…

This report emphasizes the importance of nonverbal behavior as a teacher-student relationship language and discusses some observation instruments designed to provide feedback to teachers on their nonverbal behavior. According to the report, nonverbal behaviors provide the primary vehicle for expressing emotion and leakage channels that are…