Final Internship Blog Post #14

Video Reflection #3

Last week I was observed teaching a science lesson by the assistant principal. The lesson was a review of the water cycle. In an effort to get the students more engaged and up out of their seats, they participated in an activity in which they took the perspective of a drop of water and went on a journey through the water cycle. There were dice and numbered cards at each station which would determine their fate as a water drop. Each station represented different locations and thus states of water (i.e. glaciers, aquifer, ocean, lakes and rivers, ground, atmosphere, clouds, etc.). The students had to cycle through 10 times and make note of what happened to them on a water cycle chart. At the end of the lesson a few students were selected to come up and share their journey through the water cycle. Overall it was a very engaging lesson for the students and taking on the perspective of the water drop allowed them to contextualize concepts such as evaporation, condensation, and precipitation in a personal way. When watching the video back later I realized how helpful it was to have more attention-getters in my repertoire than when I started this semester. For example, at one point in the lesson there was a glitch with the computer that caused a video that was a song about the water cycle to jump to something else, which startled us a little! Rather than losing control of the class at that point, I was able to use a musical attention-getter (the Addams Family theme song) to get the class back together and continue moving forward without losing any time or focus. Later in the lesson I was even able to make a joke about it when referencing the video again. I also found that I’ve gotten better at phrasing the directions in a clear and simple way. The activity had a lot of directions, but watching it back it was clear the students were following along and I checked in with them several times for comprehension. The students have really begun to get used to the accountable talk practices and asking each other clarifying questions. I also made sure to use things students said in my own teacher talk to keep them engaged and to connect to what they know. I also found that explicitly stating good listening behaviors or telling the students to all put their hands on their desks before giving key instructions proved to be more effective than other methods I had used in the past. I will be sure to do this more moving forward. In the future, I would also like to work on being more mindful of my body positioning in relation to the classroom and the students. There were several periods of time when I was either writing something on the board or addressing a student question and I had my back to the majority of the class for far too long. While nothing in particular happened as a result in this instance, it is generally preferable to avoid any positioning in which I have my back to students. Overall I felt very positive about the lesson after watching it back and I can see how implementing strategies and techniques from previous reflections has really begun to pay off. I plan to continue these reflective practices, and perhaps recording lessons in the future to gain perspective on areas of strength and weakness in order to continually grow as an effective educator.

Final Internship Blog Post #13

Video Reflection #2

During my final observation with my cooperating teacher, I also video recorded the lesson for later reflection. It was a science lesson about animal behaviors and the differences between types of behaviors such as learned behaviors, instincts, and habits. After watching the video back, there were several things I noticed. The lesson was well paced, with a good balance between teacher talk and student-directed tasks. In fact, I began to notice that my favorite parts of the lesson were those that were student-directed in which I was facilitating learning for the students in this manner rather than standing up in the front of the room talking. During the portions of the lesson in which students were sharing thoughts and responses whole group, I really saw the value of taking anecdotal notes about conversations with the students. In this way, I was able to connect small discoveries and wonderings students had simultaneously but independently into one seamless class-wide conversation in which students felt engaged and which encouraged diverse participation. I could also tell that in portions where new vocabulary or concepts were being reinforced, the real-world examples I provided were very helpful. In the future, however, I will try to have more of the new vocabulary visually displayed somewhere prominently in the room, especially for the ELL students. Some of the other things I would like to work on more in the future include giving shorter and clearer directions. I noticed that the more succinct directions were more successful and garnered a quicker reaction from the students. I also noticed a time when I asked the students if there were any questions and I missed a student that began to raise her hand. In the future I will try to provide a little more wait time after I ask if there are any questions. At the beginning of the lesson I went over the essential question, but I only read it once. In the future I would like to make sure I either have the students read it with me, or that I repeat it once more before jumping into the lesson. Though I did refer back to it throughout the lesson, it is important that students begin the lesson with a strong understanding of why we are doing the activities we are doing with the end goal in mind.

Final Internship Blog Post #12

Last week I had my third and final observation with my university supervisor. She observed me teaching a lesson in science in which the students dissected owl pellets to better understand owl behaviors and the owl’s place in the food chain. The lesson was hands-on and engaging and the students were able to connect a lot of their prior knowledge from our various other science units to the task. I played a fun video at the beginning of the lesson to introduce the topic of owl pellets through song. I also then showed the students a video that demonstrated a student dissecting an owl pellet. This video was helpful for the ELL students as it provided a visual representation of the instructions about how to dissect the owl pellet that I gave orally. Also for students with behavioral issues, the video modeled appropriate student behaviors for the task, which I then reiterated using the student in the video for reference. Overall the lesson was highly engaging and the students were still talking about it in the days that followed. My university supervisor also had some helpful feedback from what she observed that I will try to implement more in the future. For example, providing students with written directions to support the verbal directions given can be helpful. This can either be on the board, or for a process with many steps, perhaps a printed sheet that outlines the steps for the students which they can reference while they work. I also need to make sure I am making consistent use of the attention-getters I am using and try not to speak over students talking while they work if I need to tell them something. If I need to catch and release the students as a whole group during such an activity, I need to be consistent about the expectation that while I am talking the students are not. In the future I want to make sure I am thanking specific students for on-task behaviors early on as a method of positive reinforcement to improve my behavior management. Thanking a few students out loud for sitting quietly and waiting while a video loads, for example, is more positive and more effective than simply asking the class to sit quietly while they wait. The lesson as a whole was engaging for all of the students because it was hands-on and every student was actively participating in an activity that was more student-directed than traditional whole group instruction. In the future, as I circulate, I will want to make sure to take more thorough anecdotal notes and have specific higher order thinking (HOT) questions prepared ahead of time to ask students rather than coming up with them on the spot. In addition to creating a rubric ahead of time for what the students ultimately submit, this will help me to more accurately assess student performance and level of mastery for the task.

Final Internship Blog Post #11

Video Reflection #1

A couple of weeks ago I recorded a math lesson that I taught. Watching the video back after some time has passed allowed me to view the lesson more objectively and notice things about my teaching that I might not have otherwise. To begin with, I noticed how the way I announced that we were moving on to math excitedly translated into some student enthusiasm, with a few students saying, “Yay!” At one point in the lesson, I instructed the students to turn to a particular page number, but I could see how a few students might have missed which page number I said. It might have been helpful to have this also written on the board. The lesson was in geometry, and the shapes I had drawn on the board were a great visual reference, especially when a student forgot what vertices were. I was then able to model, using the shapes on the board, where you could find the vertices and how you could count them. This was helpful for completing the task they were then released to complete. In retrospect, it might have been helpful to do more of such modeling before each activity. In one instance, when I had released them to do something independently, I noticed a student finished early and began helping the student next to him. Perhaps this was a task that could have been done in partners with the students sitting next to each other, rather than independently. In terms of teacher behaviors, I realized that I was calling on a few students disproportionally more than others. In the future I should either use a random selection method, such as names from a jar, or another system to promote fairness and student engagement. I also felt that I could probably afford to speak a little slower and more clearly. By choosing my words more carefully and saying fewer words to convey the same idea, the students might retain more of what I am saying. Viewing this video recording was very helpful for reflecting on my teaching behaviors and ways to improve instruction. I look forward to reflecting in this way more in the future.

Final Internship Blog Post #10

On Friday we went on a field trip to MOSI for National Robotics Week. The students experienced robotics through games and demonstrations of robots solving engineering challenges. The kids were most intrigued by a robot that could solve a Rubik’s Cube they had personally scrambled, excitedly asking, “How does it do that?” The students also went to a special presentation by Aldebaran Robotics in which they were introduced to NAO, a humanoid robot that could be programmed to say and do many different things. During this presentation the students learned a bit about the coding and engineering that went into creating this robot. They also got to watch NAO dance expertly to Gangnam Style. After this, we watched the IMAX film, “Mysteries of the Unseen World.” The film explored aspects of the world around us that are invisible to the human eye as well as things that are too small, slow, or fast to be seen by normal vision. Making use of stunning time-lapse, slow motion, infrared, and magnification, the film presented views of our world as we’ve never seen it before.

All of the hands-on, visual experiences had the students completely engaged. Even students who are not typically interested in science during school hours were listening intently during the presentations. A few students even felt inspired to change their career aspirations to include science and engineering. Earlier this week I went to hear Bill Nye give a lecture at USF. In his lecture he talked about how passion for science amongst educators can translate into passion for science in the students. He discussed how students who don’t feel interested by STEM fields might be able to connect to these fields through other means, such as compelling story telling. He explained that some kids are interested in building or creating something because that’s just the kind of thing they like to do. They don’t care what you do with it afterwards, but they sure loved building it. Other kids respond to different things. For example, hearing about a kid in another country who doesn’t have power and needs a way to harness the energy they have available can motivate these kids to figure out a solution with that end goal in mind. This is just one example, but overwhelmingly, the exhibit and the film uniquely spoke to the students in an authentic way that a textbook never could. These are things I would like to incorporate more into my classroom, and with my background in film and media, I am especially interested in exploring ways to bring this into the realm of education.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is94VGbxXeQ

Final Internship Blog Post #9

This week I had my second observation with my university supervisor. She observed a math lesson in which students were learning how to find the volume of a composed figure. Essentially students would need to apply their knowledge about how to find the volume of a rectangular prism to determine the volume of a figure that is made up of two rectangular prisms combined. Although my original lesson plan had allotted an hour’s time for the entire lesson, I was aware that it might take longer for the students to master this concept. Ultimately, the lesson took two days of math instruction, and we only made it about halfway through the lesson plan in the first day’s time. As a whole, the students were engaged, and the pacing was determined based on the needs of the students. As a new teacher, I am learning each day how to better approach math instruction and I am discovering firsthand what specific misconceptions and difficulties students might have with the material. Understanding these better will help me to better plan for math instruction in the future. For example, when teaching the students how to find the volume of a composed figure, I had anticipated that they might have some trouble with identifying the dimensions of the rectangular prisms in the figure, but I did not account for the multiple ways that students might struggle with this understanding. Perhaps starting the lesson off with first exploring this concept with two-dimensional shapes would have been a better way to scaffold the lesson. Showing how we can use congruent sides and subtraction and addition to figure out the measurements of sides that are not given would have been an important understanding to have prior to the application of finding the volume of a composed figure. In addition, the textbook proposed two methods for finding the volume of these composed figures. One was finding the volume of each prism and adding them and the other was subtracting the volume of the empty space from the volume formed by enclosing the figure. The students were able to organically arrive at the first method, which involved adding the volumes of the two prisms that make up the figure. Instead of then introducing the second method, students should have been able to practice using the first method. As the students worked through the sample problems later, this was pretty unanimously the method they felt most comfortable with and understood best. Rather than frontloading the instruction with both methods, I should have let the students move on to practice and perhaps involved the second method as enrichment or support for students who were still struggling with the concept.

Final Internship Blog Post #8

This week I had my second observation with my cooperating teacher. She observed me teaching a math lesson in our geometry unit. Overall the feedback was very positive. She thought the lesson went well in terms of student understanding and engagement. She liked the real-world connections and the time cues I gave students. She felt I skillfully answered student questions and assessed whether students were prepared to move on throughout the lesson. She also gave me some feedback that I would like to implement for future lessons. Moving forward I would like to remember to have students ask more clarifying questions of each other. I would also like to figure out ways for students to be able to investigate the concepts more on their own. In terms of vocabulary pertaining to the lesson, I will try to preview specific vocabulary at the beginning of the lesson and have it up somewhere in the room, such as on the board, so that this does not get in the way of comprehension or pacing later in the lesson. In addition, given the demographics of the class, it would be a good idea to give some students note-taking starters so that if a large amount of writing is involved, this does not detract from the actual objective of the lesson for those students who struggle with writing.

Final Internship Blog Post #7

I’m becoming a really big fan of the guided reading block. In our classroom we have the added benefit of an improved student to teacher ratio. There’s my cooperating teacher, the ESE specialist, and myself during the guided reading block, so there are three different teachers meeting with small groups. We have divided up the students so I meet with three groups for half an hour each. Over the weeks we have been meeting, this past week was one of the first weeks when I began to notice marked improvement in a few areas, such as fluency and expression in oral reading. In a class that overwhelmingly struggles with attention, working in small groups has been a great way to keep sustained focus on a lesson. I have been making use of the leveled readers in tying in skills in small group with those in the whole group lesson. This past week, however, I was very excited to find that the next leveled reader I was going to be using was about B.B. King. I personally had interest in the topic, and coincidentally so did the kids! In my three groups, only two students in one of my groups knew who he is, yet all of the students found the biography of a famous person to be very interesting. They were all extremely engaged and were sad when we had to stop reading. I was also able to incentivize completing work in a timely fashion with getting to see a video of B.B. King performing a song mentioned in the text. Moving forward, I would like to incorporate more of these strategies into my guided reading block. Finding texts the students will be interested in that are of an appropriate reading level and applying the same target skills to these texts as well as incentivizing with relevant technology-based audio or visual explorations of content will hopefully improve engagement and pacing.

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.

Final Internship Blog Post #5

In the month and a half that I have been interning in this classroom, one of the biggest adjustments for me has been learning how to best teach so many students with exceptionalities. The issues students are facing in this classroom run the gamut from Tourette’s to cerebral palsy to dyslexia. Most of the students in the class have ADD/ADHD and several students in the class have IEPs with behavior goals. This classroom also contains all of the ELL students in the grade, who are at various stages of language acquisition. Last week, for example, we got two new students from Saudi Arabia who do not speak any English. The ability grouping has resulted in a classroom in which students have such varied reasons for producing on the level that resulted in their placement in this classroom. There are children who have difficulty with focus and children whose behavior gets in the way of them learning effectively in a classroom environment. Then there are ELL students who are still in the process of acquiring the language of instruction. Still then is the student with cerebral palsy, who along with another student in the class is being recommended by the classroom teacher to test for gifted. Overwhelmingly as a whole, however, the biggest difficulty is keeping the entire class focused and on-task. Following basic directions is also a struggle. I have been incorporating strategies along the way to address these issues, especially in the areas of behavior management, pacing, and accountability for directions. Moving forward though, I would like to work more on differentiating as much as possible in an attempt to enrich those students who may be feeling held back by their classmates and support those students who may feel things are moving too fast. While this is my main goal for the class, I do grow exceedingly worried about the pace through which we are required to go through the material in preparation for testing compared to the pace that would be necessary for most of the students in the class to achieve a level of mastery. My original frustration with this has been met with the reminder that as teachers, we are meant to be advocates for our students. Most of these students are already receiving accommodations for testing and interventions in the classroom on a daily basis, but as my collaborating teacher reminded me, it is our job to make sure they are receiving any accommodations that are available to them if they aren’t already. I want to maintain high expectations for all of my students, but in the case of students with exceptionalities beyond their control, I also want to ensure that my expectations are reasonable and that I am doing all I can to support these students in reaching their full potential. For me at the moment, my biggest goal is determining what exactly that support should be for each student.