Supervisor Observation # 1. Reflection

During this first observation cycle I learned a lot about my teaching and the students. One learning claim that I want to mention is that I learned that it is very important to have student investigate and try things out on their own. When the students try Science investigations on their own they are truly getting the hands-on experience and benefiting from it. Some students even discover something that wasn’t even taught to them yet. For example, looking back over my video I noticed at the time 24:58 one of my students said, “I noticed that the paper clips were more attracted to the north pole than the south pole.” and that student would have never been able to make that discovery if he didn’t do this investigation. Also, this student was able to make that connection about the north pole before the next lesson about compasses was even taught.

Another, learning claim that I made from this lesson is that using technology helps the lesson become more alive and interesting to the students. For example, in the observation video between the times 9:00-10:40 was when I showed the first half of a video about magnetism to the students. Looking back at the video I noticed that all the students’ attention was on the video and they were really paying attention. Having this little bit of technology in my lesson really helped because it made the students more motivated in wanting to try the investigation. Also, this video was a great review for students that didn’t remember the lesson from the day before. The video was a wonderful way to show educational information but in a fun way to students.

My last learning claim is that it is important to encourage students to make predictions and be okay that it might be wrong. For example, in my observation video at 23:27 I said, “I think because the north pole attracts the paper clip the south pole isn’t going to attract to the paper clip.” Even though I knew that my prediction was wrong I wanted to show the students that when we make predictions it is okay to be wrong and we can learn from them. Also, it was a wonderful way to make an informal assessment and determine if the class understood what happened in their investigation or if some students were still struggling. Looking back at the students' work and how they answered certain questions during the classroom discussions I determined the students understood the concepts taught to them. Overall, those learning claims I made are very true because I noticed it first hand and looking over my data and observation video it really helped me reflect back over my lesson and learn from it.

Student Work:

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