Peer Coaching

During the preconference, my peer and I discussed some things that I wanted her to look for when I did my lesson. I asked my peer to look for if I am calling on different students and not just the same ones, for student engagement, and to see if I let the students answer the questions and not just give them the answers right away. I decided to have my peer look for those certain things during my lesson because those are the things I think I need to work on the most when teaching. I didn’t have my peer collect data on my inquiry because it involves working one-on-one with a student and I wanted more feedback on how I do with bigger groups of students during a lesson.

The subject that I taught during my peer observation was math and it was on money and time. My lesson was a review for the students on those concepts because the next day they were going to have a test on it. My CT took a smaller group of students that are below level and worked with them on the same concepts in the back of the room while I worked with a larger group of students for this lesson. I chose to do alternative teaching with my CT because I knew the smaller group needed more guidance, more one-on-one time, and not do as challenging problems for them to understand the lesson. In my group, I had the students go over time first and I passed out clocks to them. I asked some review questions about the clock before I had them do some problems. I asked questions like, “What does the little hand on the clock stand for?” and “What does the big hand on the clock stand for.” Then I asked the student to make certain times with their clocks. For example, I asked them to show me 6:30 on their clocks and I walked around to see who was getting it and helped students out. I also had some students come up and show the class their clocks over the projector.

After the review on the clocks I passed out fake money to each student. I asked them to make a certain amount with the money I provided them. For example, I said, “I want you to make 99 cents as many ways as you can.” I did a few different problems like this and asked some students to come up to the projector and show the class one way to make the certain amount that I was asking. I made the students show me different ways to make a certain amount so that they could understand that there could be more than one correct way to form their answers. After the review, I gave the students a worksheet with the same concepts on it for more practice. I chose to teach this lesson this way because it gave me an understanding of which students are still struggling with these concepts. Also, it was a good way to do a formative assessment with the students. I think that my lesson went well because the students were involved and it gave the students extra practice with those concepts. There was good time management and I asked H.O.T questions during the lesson that would challenge the students’ thinking.

During my postconference my peer and I discussed the things I asked her to look for during my lesson. My peer said that the students were really engaged during my lesson and when some students got distracted I did a good job at getting them back on task. Also, my peer said that I gave the students enough “think time” when having them work on the problems and I didn’t just give them the answers right away. Some advice that my peer gave me that I thought was helpful was that I should monitor all the students during my lessons. I did call on a variety of students but there was this one student that seemed to be uninterested during the review. My peer said that I didn’t call on him and he looked a little bit lost. I figured out which student my peer was talking about and I said that the student is very shy and it’s hard for me to get him to answer questions in a whole group setting. My peer suggested that instead of calling on him in front of everyone to go over to him and ask him a few one-on-one questions when I circulate the room just so that I could know if he understands the information. This advice was helpful because I want the whole class to get involved during my lessons and it’s important to know if all the students are getting the concepts before moving on.This peer conference cycle was helpful because someone new got to come in and observe me and that’s important because as a future teacher many different people will be coming into my classroom observing me and how I teach. Also, it was helpful because I got to hear someone else’s opinion on how they think my lesson went. My peer was able to noticed something that I never noticed during my lesson and gave me good advice. Overall, I think this peer conference cycle went great and it would be nice to do it again.

#peercoaching #mathlesson #datacollection #FEAP5c #FEAP1d #FEAP5e