| The main goal of this study is to gain a greater understanding of Professor John Fanselow's Observation course which was offered in the fall of 1983 at Teachers College, Columbia University. The discipline of this required graduate course was the observation of interactions inside and outside the classroom.; I used the responsive approach (Stake, 1975) as the methodological framework for this study. During the semester, I audiotaped the course class sessions. During the last week of the semester, I requested the students to complete the Academic Course Questionnaire (Frentzen, 1982) to obtain information about their opinions on the course activities. I also interviewed three students to gather information which would complement that collected by the questionnaire, and interviewed Professor Fanselow to obtain information on his own opinion about his course.; I used the "activity" as the unit of analysis for content-analyzing the audiotapes. I developed a set of Subject-Matter and Procedure Activities which emerged from the analysis itself and a nine-columned, multifaceted, content-analysis system to code the categories. Each column of the system described a different aspect of the professor's teaching. It also described the students' actions and questions.; By analyzing the audiotapes with these categories and content-analysis system, I found that most activities were grouped in clusters that followed what I called the Pattern of Student Work, Student Report and Discussion Sequence. This pattern started when the professor introduced a new topic by assigning a task for his students to explore in group work activities. I also analyzed the professor's book (Fanselow, 1987). From this analysis, I identified and described the Theory of Ends and Means. I then compared this theory with the activities the professor organized and found much congruence between them. The findings of the questionnaire revealed that most students seemed satisfied with the course activities but felt that the amount of assignments was too much. |
