CT Observation #2. Reflection

mmaloni
Nov 16, 2017
2 min read

During this observation cycle I once again learned a lot about my students. One learning claim that I want to mention is that I learned when teaching this mathematics lesson is that it is very important to ask higher order thinking questions. Without having those type of questions in your lesson the students won’t be able to do in-depth thinking. If everything in the lesson is straight forward the students could lose interest and might not truly learn. Looking back at my observation video at 15 minutes and 28 seconds I asked the students this higher order thinking question, “Now that we know this angle is a straight angle which is 180 degrees, and the problem gives you one part of the angle and one unknow part of the angle how would you solve this problem?” Asking the students this question made them think about the steps they must do to solve a problem like that. Also, when questions like this are asked the teacher can then determine if the students are ready to move on in the lesson based on the students’ answers.

Another, learning claim that I want to mention is that having the students do an exit ticket at the end of a lesson is very beneficial for the teacher and the students. Looking back at my observation video at 41 minutes and 5 seconds I passed out an exit ticket for the students to work on independently. While I was walking around the classroom I was noticing that some students were doing all the steps that I taught them to solve for those problems on the exit ticket and then other students were struggling to complete it. After, the lesson was done I went back and looked at the students’ classwork and exit tickets. Then when I was done grading all the exit tickets I was able to put the class into two groups. One group would be the students that are understanding the concept and the other group of students were the ones that were still struggling. My CT and myself came up with the plan to pull those two groups the next day and work with them. My CT would get one group and I would get the other group. If I didn’t make the exit ticket some students that were still struggling with the concepts might have fallen through the cracks and it was important that I had that data to look at and made a good decision to spit students into groups. Overall, those learning claims I stated are very true and very important to do in the classroom to benefit the students and hit learning needs.

Student Work

Classwork: