Level II CT Observation #1 Reflection

One of the aspects of my lesson that was implemented differently than I had planned was the formative assessment. Due to a time crunch, I skipped the formative assessment and went straight to the summative assessment. However, this was a terrible mistake. In the evaluation from my CT, she said that I could have used the text marking as the assessment instead of the Venn diagram. I jumped to something harder that was too difficult for most. This leads to my statement that if I were to teach this lesson to the same group of kids, I would have done the assessment differently. Instead of having the students do the Venn diagram I would have them do the text marking. If the text marking proved to be too easy for the students who need to be enriched, I would have had them make the Venn diagram when they were done.

Another thing I would have done differently was to have more visuals up. I had the visuals of the African Americans we were learning about, which the students liked, but that was not enough. I should have also had a visual up with some vocabulary words. I could have looked through the three sections of text, picked out the most difficult words, and written kid-friendly definitions of the words on some chart paper. This would have saved some time when I was explaining the definitions and asking other students if they knew what the words meant. Had I had a visual, I could have just read the definition from the paper and then the kids would have had a reference if they forgot the definition. One of the words that absolutely needed to be on a visual was “contribution”. I spent some time going over its meaning at the beginning of the lesson when I was stating the objective but some students were still confused on what it meant. I noticed this (13:50) when one of the students called out that they did not know what contribution meant.

There are a couple of things I would do the same if I were to teach this lesson over. One of the things I would keep the same is having the students sit in a circle on the carpet. I like that it allows proximity and it makes it easier for when students work with their shoulder partners. However, I could have taken more advantage of the fact that they were sitting next to each other to do a couple of turn and talks. Even though I was running out of time, I should have done at least one turn and talk because as my CT said in my evaluation, I did most of the work. The students were disengaged at times and that was because I was doing all of the talking and they did not get a chance to share or do group work until the end. Aside from including turn and talks, I should have also made sure to include higher-order thinking questions. These are important to ask and since I was caught up with going over vocabulary and doing other things, I forgot to.

A particular instance that comes to mind is when one of the students asked me to read the caption on the Martin Luther King picture I had on my poster (6:04). It surprised me that he asked but also made me feel good that he took interest in what the caption said. I was planning to read the caption to the students when I was presenting the pictures but it slipped my mind. I was happy that he mentioned it because he reminded me to go back and read it to the class. The caption next to his picture was a part of his “I Have a Dream” speech. In the caption it said that he wanted his children to be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. To me, this (6:36) was a teachable moment and one of the things I liked about my lesson. I asked the students what he meant by “the content of the character” and a couple of them raised their hands. The student I called on had difficulty explaining herself but then I had another student help her out. Finally, I elaborated on what the student who helped her out said to make sure everyone understood what the phrase meant.

I believe that the students did not learn what was intended to the extent I wanted them to learn it. This was due to the fact that I skipped the formative assessment and went straight to the summative assessment instead of using the text marking as my only assessment. By doing this, I went beyond the objective. Instead of just explaining the contributions, which they would have been able to do after doing the text marking, they had to also compare and contrast them. This left some of them confused and as my CT said in the evaluation, “At the end, the objective was still unclear to some students.” After I turned the recorder off, I went around to answer student questions and I noticed that many students were struggling. I can take blame for this performance because I jumped ahead when I should not have. On the other hand, there were students who finished quickly and then did not have anything to do. It was too easy for them. This shows me that I did poorly at differentiating.

Based on what happened in this lesson, there are many steps I will take to improve my future lessons. A few of these things are pacing, visuals, turn and talks, and differentiation. It is extremely easy for me to lose track of time and this is something I need to continue to work on. It usually happens because I feel bad when I am not able to call on a student so I usually call on as many as I can. However, if I do turn and talks, I can steer clear from this problem because even though the students will not be able to share their thought with the class, they will be able to share it with their shoulder partner. Next time I will also make sure think ahead of time of the visuals I might need for the lesson. Lastly, I will need to think more about how I can differentiate a lesson. I enjoyed teaching social studies and would like to do more social studies lessons in the future. Of course, next time I will incorporate more of the things I did not do in this lesson so that my next lesson will be more successful.

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