Level I US Observation #2 Reflection

Overall, I believe that my lesson went well as I had expected. The one thing I did notice was that my students were getting distracted often. If I were to teach this lesson to the same group of students I would try to minimize distractions. For example, my students wanted to get up to get their highlighters from their desks, and then erasers. To minimize distractions the next time around, I would make sure to ask them if they have everything they need before we begin the lesson because there will be no interruptions or getting up during the lesson. I would also make sure they have gone to the bathroom because I had one student who said she urgently had to go and this caused the other students to want to go as well.

One thing that surprised me in the lesson is that the students really understood the story. I thought that by their writing, they had not truly understood it. However, they did and were inspired by Ruby. I could tell this by the way they talked about everything Ruby did and how brave she was. This comes to show that although they may have a hard time expressing themselves in writing, they did comprehend the story. One connection I can make to my literature is how effective it can be to work in small groups. I liked being able to give more individualized attention to the students. I know that it would have been an extremely difficult lesson to do if I would have been teaching it to the entire class rather than the small group.

One way my teaching method was effective was that I modeled what I wanted the students to do. I gave an example of an event from the story and how Ruby reacted to it. I used details from the text to support my answer. It was effective for each of them to have a copy of the book in front of them because they follow along when I read a passage or pointed something important out. Another thing I did was make sure to point out in the beginning that they had done a good job but that there were some things that could be improved. I did not want to hurt their confidence in their writing so I made sure to say that I would help them make their writing even better.

As a whole, I enjoyed teaching this small group lesson. I was able to see the difference in teaching a whole-class lesson and a small-group lesson. There were of course many advantages to small-lessons and clearly one of them is that you can provide the students with individualized attention. Also, I can see right away when a student is off task or distracted because they are right in front of me. When teaching a whole class, it is harder to notice when a person is off task.

#reflection #feaps1