From time to time the author teaches an introduction to education course for those students who are considering education as a profession. In past experiences the students reported not knowing what to look for or how to observe in elementary classrooms. This makes sense since many times it is assumed the students know what to look for. The course, TE 120 - Exploring Education I, is based around the State of Michigan, USA Core teaching practices.

Those practices are:
1. Leading a group discussion
2. Explaining and modeling content, practices, and strategies
3. Eliciting and interpreting individual students’ thinking
4. Diagnosing particular common patterns of student thinking and development in a subject-matter domain
5. Implementing norms and routines for classroom discourse and work
6. Coordinating and adjusting instruction during a lesson
7. Specifying and reinforcing productive student behavior
8. Implementing organizational routines
9. Setting up and managing small group work
10. Building respectful relationships with students
11. Talking about a student with parents or other caregivers
12. Learning about students’ cultural, religious, family, intellectual, and personal experiences and resources for use in instruction
13. Setting long- and short-term learning goals for students
14. Designing single lessons and sequences of lessons
15. Checking student understanding during and at the conclusion of lessons
16. Selecting and designing formal assessments of student learning
17. Interpreting the results of student work, including routine assignments, quizzes, tests, projects, and standardized assessments
18. Providing oral and written feedback to students
19. Analyzing instruction for the purpose of improving it.

After a few tries at teaching the course the author realized that undergraduates need to be purposefully taught the basics of research and participant observation. Using A Simple Guide to Ethnography (Guth, 2013) these students were taught the basics of fieldwork research as part of their coursework. After instruction the students were sent into the field to do thirty hours of observation and in subsequent class meetings they discussed their findings in small groups and reported back to each other as to their observations and experiences.

As a participant/observer the author discovered the depth and detail of the discussions changed dramatically. What was once observations such as, "I think the teacher did a good job," to "The teacher kept the entire class engaged for a total of 38 minutes during a science lesson about states of matter."

The presentation will highlight the major points of the Guth article and give examples of the improvement of student writing.

Keywords: Education, qualitative, research, pre-service teachers, ethnography.