Collaborating Teacher Observation 1. Reflection Blog (Final Internship)

Reflection:

When looking back over my lesson there were some aspects that were implemented differently than I planned. When I showing the students arrays and connecting them to area models I wanted the students to use their own white board and work in groups, but I was noticing there was some confusion throughout the whole class. In my video at 21 minutes and 32 seconds I decided to show a few more problems to the class then having them work in groups. One teaching practice claim that I want to state is that if teachers see something is not working or students are not getting the concepts in the lessons it’s important to change things up and not do exactly what was on the lesson plans. So, for my lesson I just had to readjust my plans for my learners. Taking the extra time to model and explain more area models helped the class out and by the end of the lesson they were understanding the concepts.

Something that surprised me during my lesson is that not one student tried to estimate when finding the answer for the area models. Prior to this lesson the students were estimating to find all the products so I thought that some students would try to estimate when solving. Another, claim about teaching practice is that if you don’t state those common misconceptions to the students they might think about a concept in a completely different way. In my video, at 10 minutes and 48 seconds I mention to the students that with area model they do not estimate because they are finding the exact product.

Analysis:

During this lesson there was a group of students that did especially well. The students that did especially well are the ones the usually do good in math. Those students remembered everything when solving the review problems before the content was taught and when learning the new material, they picked up on the steps very quickly. During my video at 15 minutes and 9 seconds one student even said that it doesn’t matter what side of the area model you solve first you still get the same answer. The student noticing that before I could point it out was very impressive. I accounted for this performance of this group of students by the work they did in their notebooks during the review and the lesson. It is important during teaching practice to let those students that master the content quickly to still answer questions and be involved. Yes, it’s important to focus on the students that are struggling but the students that master concepts fast need that push and questioning too.

Based on what happened in this lesson my next steps will be to pull the students that are still struggling and work more with them on area models before the new concept is taught. I plan to teach distributive property next to this class because it connects to area models. I will use information from this evaluation in future lesson planning to make sure I am hitting all my students’ learning needs. I need to challenge the students that master the material and help the students that are struggling. It is important that teachers know their learners and meet their needs so that the students can be successful.

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