Fall Practicum Reflection Blog Post #1

This week I had my first coaching cycle and observations of the semester. Though I have taught lessons and worked with the students every week thus far, this was the first opportunity I’ve had to get so much feedback on my instruction. I have spent a lot of time focusing on behavior management strategies and contemplating my own approach to classroom management, but having my teaching observed provided me with the opportunity to really understand what I need to work on specifically while teaching a lesson.

The lessons being taught this week were part of the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) in a two week unit incorporating science concepts of force and motion with reading and writing skills, such as identifying main idea and key supporting details in informational text. Ultimately at the end of the unit the students will be able to write a scientific report demonstrating mastery of these skills and concepts in both subject areas.

There were many positives to the lessons I taught this week, but there were also many things I became aware of that I will need to work on. The first thing I noticed was that a lesson with a suggested duration of 30-45 minutes ended up taking our class over an hour to complete. While I know pacing is a difficult and ongoing skill to acquire, there were several key reasons why this was happening that I should be able to improve upon in the future. For example, in these particular lessons it is mentioned in the lesson plan that the teacher should go over with students any words in the text with which they are unfamiliar or uncertain of the meaning. I ended up spending a large amount of time on going over words with the students and trying to get them to reach the definitions themselves with help from each other and myself. This seemed important to me at the time, but in retrospect, the objective of the lesson was for students to focus on main idea and key supporting details. I spent a disproportionate amount of time on vocabulary where simply giving a quick definition and moving on would have sufficed for the purposes of the lesson.

Another reason the lesson took longer than expected was because of the amount of time guided practice with partners took as the students were filling out their graphic organizers with partners. One thing I need to work on is explicit modeling. When filling out the portion of the graphic organizer that I modeled at the beginning of the lesson, I demonstrated the type of answer that students would be expected to give, but did not model explicitly enough how that answer was reached. By going back to the text and showing students exactly how I reached my answer, students would be able to then move through the activity on their own much more swiftly and successfully. This touches on another concern I had about student engagement. Working on being more animated during think-alouds would not only aid in comprehension, but would also keep students more engaged during modeling. The other thing that would have helped with pacing is if I had made better use of catch and release. During the time when students were working together on completing sections of their graphic organizers, I found myself having the same conversations with multiple groups. In the future, rather than having multiple conferences with individual groups, I should be able to catch them and address any misconceptions or obstacles that are occurring with such frequency as a whole group. On a related note, if I tell students they have ten minutes to complete something, I should check in with them after ten minutes, even if I perceive they might need more time, rather than just continuing on past the time I had allotted without saying anything.

In terms of student engagement, another thing to consider is how to handle the fact that some students will finish much faster than others. In one particular lesson, there was a graphic organizer in which the main idea was done whole group, the key supporting details were done with partners, and then the summary was to be done by the students individually. Some pairs finished identifying the key supporting details much earlier than others, and eventually the pairs that were taking longer began cutting into the time that was allotted for writing the summary independently. In the future, rather than making the whole group wait as I am conferencing with students, I should instruct students ahead of time on what the next step will be so that those students can move on while I continue to conference with individual groups or pairs that may need more time.

Overall there where several positives, such as addressing the use of the word “story” for informational text, wait time, not allowing call-outs, real-world examples, and acting things out when needed to clarify the meaning of a word. Moving forward, the things I will hope to improve upon are pacing, explicit modeling, and more animated think-alouds.

Instructional Planning for Diverse Learners Blog Post #1

It is now the fall semester and we are all in our practicum placements. Being at the school for only two days of the week is tough, but being there for the full day uninterrupted has been such a unique learning experience and the most immersive of the program thus far. I have been placed in a fourth grade ELA classroom. This semester we are also taking a course in instructional planning for diverse learners, for which I will be making several posts such as this.

The fourth grade class I am with has 18 students. There are four students in the class with ADHD, one with ODD, and four students with a 504 plan. There are also three students in the class who are classified as ELLs. They are at various stages and one of them no longer receives accommodations, but is still being monitored. These are all things that I will be taking into account throughout the semester when I plan lessons and observe the progress of these students.

Getting to be in the school from preplanning and through the whole first week of classes was an excellent opportunity to witness firsthand what goes into establishing the classroom community, rules, and expectations I wrote about so often in previous posts on this blog. At the particular school in which I have my practicum, there is a highly transient population in a community experiencing the stresses of crime and poverty. This makes for a student population with a particularly diverse and high stakes set of needs. Behavior management has never seemed more important to me than it has in these past few weeks.

In reading Elliot W. Eisner’s The Educational Imagination, his chapter on the three curricula that schools teach particularly spoke to what I had been experiencing in my placement. He states that every school not only has the explicit curriculum that one would find in a lesson plan, but also the implicit curriculum. The implicit curriculum is everything students learn from school about what is valued or important, such as compliance or competitiveness. Even the amount of time spent on a particular subject sends to students the implicit message of its perceived importance, or lack thereof. This is very important to planning, but it also sheds light on some of the issues of behavior management I was observing. Oftentimes the clash between teacher and student was not because of the explicit aspects of the situation (the student understood the rules) but because of the implicit clash between rules in the classroom and the student’s life outside of the classroom. A large number of classroom activities require students to either not talk at all or whisper quietly. Many students, however, come from households with many people, in which they must shout to be heard or they are accustomed to shouting to one another from across the street. There is a difference between a student who is being loud to be disruptive and a student who is unintentionally loud. When planning, it is important to consider if the classroom rules and activities being presented to the students are more implicitly compatible with the background of some of your students over others and if students from one particular background are being continuously praised or continuously marginalized by teacher attitudes.

Reference

Eisner, E.W. (2001). The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of school programs (3^rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.