All Things CLASS

Good morning,

I'm curious how the Pre-K CLASS tool looks at Effective Facilitation during social conversations that do not have a clear learning objective. For example, during free play a teacher and child may have an extended conversation about the child's birthday or maybe about what they did that weekend. In these extended conversations, the teacher asks several follow-up questions and actively participates in the exchange, which encourages the child to continue participating in the conversation. How would this be captured in Effective Facilitation? Or would it mostly be captured in Language Modeling? Thanks for your input!

Hi Jenny, 

CLASS observer for 10 years, from Florida here! I believe it would fall under both "effective facilitation" as well as parts of language modeling. Under effective facilitation, it would count as teacher involvement, and effective questioning, as the social conversation would serve as an activity that the teacher creates and the children engage in. However, when scoring these social interactions, we'd want to look at both the number of children and the duration of the activity. If it's for a short period of time with only one child, and there are many children in the classroom, it would change how effective the conversation was overall. As far as language modeling, it would definitely count under "frequent conversations" with contingent responding and back and forth exchanges, but also possibly under open-ended questions depending on the nature of the conversation. That's my understanding anyway. Hope that helps :-)