Question
What are the three domains observed during the CLASS?
Answer
As the observer watching, I am trying to pay close attention to interactions between teachers and children, and among children. I look at those interactions in three main domains.
Figure 1. Domains of interaction.
Emotional Support
The first domain is emotional support. This is really looking at how strong the relationships are in the classroom. What are the ways in which the teachers are promoting students' social-emotional development? If I am thinking about a person as the CLASS, this is the heart and the feeling. For example, how does this classroom feel when I walk in the door? Is this a warm, supported, happy place where I can tell the kids and teachers are happy to be there and happy to be with each other?
Classroom Organization
The next domain that I look at is classroom organization. This is not about the physical organization of your classroom per se, but it is about how the classroom is structured to promote learning. Are there clear expectations? Are there clear routines and procedures? Are there clear strategies for engagement? Some of the physical layouts may help with this, but it's not measuring the physical environment as a be-all and end-all. It may be using that as a tool towards the broader structures and organization of the classroom. Again, if I am thinking of this analogy of the CLASS as a person, this is like the skeleton, what is holding everything together, and providing the structure. First, we want to make sure kids feel loved and supported, then we want to make sure there is a clear structure so that there are predictability and consistency.
Instructional Support
The last bucket I look at is instructional support. How are teachers actually facilitating learning and development? How are they promoting higher-order thinking and language use? How are they providing feedback to children? Thinking about the body analogy, this is like the brain. This is where learning happens. Instructional support is not necessarily about the content that you are teaching, which curriculum you are using, or which theme you are on. This is about how you are teaching and how you are promoting children's thinking.
I am functionally looking at three different domains. I am thinking about feelings, organization, and intellectual engagement or instructional support. As I am observing, I am taking notes in these domains to figure out how I am going to score the classroom. The other thing that is important to think about as we think about CLASS observations is that as an observer, I am not out to get you in any way. I am not out to just find this one child who is having a horrible day and let that influence everything. As an observer, my goal is to really capture the experience of children in the classroom.
To that end, I am really looking for the average experience of the average child on an average day. I want to capture what most kids experience when they are in this room on most days. I think that is really important if we are going to use this tool for coaching and for feedback. Yes, there is a time and place where we want to problem-solve those individual children or small groups of children who may have different needs from the rest of the group, but by and large, I am thinking about the classroom as a whole. There are other tools that you can use if you are trying to dig deeper into one student or one subset of students, but with the CLASS, I am trying to look at the average experience of the average child on an average day. That is the general approach of how observations work and what observers are looking for.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Interpreting Your CLASS Scores, presented by Jennifer Rosenbaum, MEd.
