Level II US Observation #1 Reflection

Seeing as though this was my first time doing a whole-class math lesson, I believe I did a good job. The majority of the students understood the lesson and I could see this while I walked around and did my formative assessment. Those who were not comprehending the lesson were placed in the reteach group. My CT was absent and was supposed to help me out in this last part of the lesson which was the differentiating part, but although it took me a little longer, I was able to do it on my own. Another issue I had was technical difficulties.

One thing that I did not expect to happen was to have so much trouble with the ELMO. That wasted about five minutes of my teaching time but those things happen sometimes and you have to learn to deal with them. Now I know how to fix it and if I ever have trouble with technology, I know to immediately call for help instead of trying to figure it out myself. One particular thing I did well was to state the objective at the beginning the lesson (00:09). Not only did I read it to my students, but I asked them to explain what “record” meant in their own words. The student I called on said what she thought and I said it was correct and then restated the objective with her words.

I chose one of my students to go up and share their work and answer on the ELMO. She had her work neatly shown and recorded all of her trades as well as having a quick pic representing the problem. As she was up there I tried to throw out some HOT questions to the class and also asked her to explain some of the things she did in the problem. A moment that comes to my mind is when two of the students in the class raised their hands because they had HOT questions for her (13:25 and 14:01). I love when the students do this because it means they are using higher-order thinking. I also like when students are able to share their thoughts with one another so I had them do a turn and talk (19:00). After the turn and talk I had a student share what she and her partner discussed.

One thing that surprised me about my lesson was how well most of the students were understanding the objective and solving the problems. At the end I had to split up the class into three groups: reteach group (green), core group (orange), and enriched group (red). I only expected four or five students to be in the red group and for most to be in the core group. However, I only had five in my reteach group and the rest of the class was split up evenly into the red and orange groups. I was happy to place more students than expected in the red group though because it meant that they were really understanding the lesson.

One connection that I can make to my coursework is that it is important to connect the lesson to the interests of the students. I attempted to do this by using a student’s name in the word problem and making it about her going to Chuck E. Cheese’s and playing games. She won tickets and then used some to buy a stuffed animal, so the students had to figure out how many tickets she had left. I could tell right away that the students were intrigued by the question.

I did my best to be precise in my use of mathematics vocabulary. First off, there was already some vocabulary in the objective which was the word record. I made sure my students understood this. Later on, I used words such as regroup, value, and trade. These are words that they have been using and I made sure to incorporate them in the questions I asked them. I believe I did alright when it comes to being accurate in my discussion of mathematics content. There was a time where I worded a question in a confusing way (14:59). A student was able to answer my question but I did try to rephrase my question later on to clear up any confusion.

I did support student accuracy by going around the room after giving them a problem to check answers and let them they know if they were or were not on the right track. There were some students who I said “good job” to and others who I told to check their math when doing the algorithm. I wanted to make sure there were connections being made between representations. So, when I asked them to solve the problem, I made it a point to tell them that I wanted to see a model, or a quick pic, in their notebook representing the numbers. As I walked around I noticed that most of them followed my directions. I had to ask a few of them to draw a quick pic to help them solve the problem. There was one student who was actually using a manipulative, the base-ten blocks, to solve the problem. I pointed this out when talking about the problem and said it was great to physically use the blocks when possible. Of course though, there is not enough blocks for everyone in the class to have their own.

Just like there were a couple moments in my lessons that were learning experiences for me because they did not go as expected, there were some I am very proud of. I did a good job stating the objective in the beginning, had a student demonstrate her work for the class, asked them HOT questions, included a turn and talk, and placed them into differentiated groups in the end. The more lessons I teach, the more experience I will gain and the better teacher I will become.

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