Final Internship Blog Post #6

This past week I completed an observation cycle after having a post conference with my university supervisor. The lesson I was observed for was in Science during our unit on human body organs and what they do! The specific lesson was about the lungs and their function, following a lesson the previous day about the heart and the circulatory system. Overall in terms of student engagement and behaviors, the lesson went well. There were a few off-task behaviors here and there but overwhelmingly most of the students seemed engaged. The previous night I had created a model of how the lungs and diaphragm work together using balloons and a water bottle. This model helped illustrate the concept for the students in a way that was visual and hands-on. I passed the model around during the lesson so students could see for themselves the relationship between the contracting and relaxing of the diaphragm and inflation of the lungs. The ultimate assessment piece for the lesson involved integrating information from the previous day’s lesson with information from that day’s lesson to answer a question about why we needed to breathe harder when we exercise. In reviewing our answers later it was clear that some students struggled to make the connection. Upon further reflection, I think I should have incorporated more higher order thinking questions into the actual lesson, since this would have enabled students to not only practice critical thinking, but also develop more of a mastery level with the content. Also, this lesson was a reminder of the importance of aligning your assessment with your instruction. Though I did not perceive the question at the end of the lesson to be too much of a leap from what we had discussed during the lesson, clearly there was a disconnect for some students. If the purpose of the lesson was to understand the function of the lungs, perhaps modeling other questions of this type and magnitude earlier in the lesson would have helped the students to be more successful in answering the question at the end. The discussion of oxygen and the importance of both the circulatory systems and respiratory systems in delivering this to our bodies should have been more deeply emphasized during instruction.