Lesson analysis
I felt like the lesson, overall, was a success. Students seemed consistently and authentically engaged from start to finish; there was evidence of interest and learning in both the literacy content and the subject-area content. Collaboration was fairly strong for the most part, although by the end of the partner section I allowed more flexibility in partner work, and as a result students started working more independently (though still I observed them showing their partners things they were finding).
Student learning will be discussed in the section on Observations and assessments of student learning; in this section, I will focus on the implementation of the lesson and my own decisionmaking during it. Without recounting everything, here are some thoughts on each component of the lesson plan as implemented.
I thought my introduction worked fairly effectively to help frame the lesson engagingly, but I also made sure it went by quickly. In this video, I took a little under minute and a half to get the students remembering the topic, relate my own experience reading with a particular question in mind, and transition into a question about strategies. (Apologies for video quality!)
Student learning will be discussed in the section on Observations and assessments of student learning; in this section, I will focus on the implementation of the lesson and my own decisionmaking during it. Without recounting everything, here are some thoughts on each component of the lesson plan as implemented.
I thought my introduction worked fairly effectively to help frame the lesson engagingly, but I also made sure it went by quickly. In this video, I took a little under minute and a half to get the students remembering the topic, relate my own experience reading with a particular question in mind, and transition into a question about strategies. (Apologies for video quality!)
Lit - Intro.avi from Jesse Gottschalk on Vimeo.
While I was prepared to solicit a few ideas from students, and to eventually teach about skimming if nobody provided that, I found that the first student to respond gave a description of a process that was clearly related to skimming (“[I look at the page] until I see an answer,” she began). Rather than solicit more ideas, I decided to build on that one and relate it to the idea of skimming, which I then defined.
In the next portion of the discussion, I asked for words we could skim for. The initial words provided were: “ate,” “animals,” “food,” “fish,” “taste,” “hungry,” and “chewing.” I chose to be only moderately selective in accepting answers – I wrote all on the board (except for “fish”; instead of writing it, I changed “animals” to “animal names” in order to be inclusive of any other animal names students may generate). Eventually I pushed students to include other forms of the word “ate” (eat/eating), then I added the words “food chain” and “energy” (with a brief explanation for the latter). In retrospect, I think this worked out okay, but if a few more student words had been further off-track, there would have been a problem: I would have run out of room on the board, and the board would have been populated with words that I anticipate would not have been helpful. I don’t think that my responses to words that I thought were unhelpful were very productive – I think I ended up in a middle ground between enthusiasm and unenthusiasm that probably neither made students feel encouraged nor explained why I wasn’t fully in agreement (see video below). In retrospect, I think I should have accepted all answers without hesitancy – and then, in the concluding whole-group discussion after the independent reading, asked them which words had been most useful. (I could also have written smaller so space wouldn’t have been a problem.) While I don’t feel like my responses discouraged any students from further participation, I could envision alternative scenarios with different students where that could have happened.
In the next portion of the discussion, I asked for words we could skim for. The initial words provided were: “ate,” “animals,” “food,” “fish,” “taste,” “hungry,” and “chewing.” I chose to be only moderately selective in accepting answers – I wrote all on the board (except for “fish”; instead of writing it, I changed “animals” to “animal names” in order to be inclusive of any other animal names students may generate). Eventually I pushed students to include other forms of the word “ate” (eat/eating), then I added the words “food chain” and “energy” (with a brief explanation for the latter). In retrospect, I think this worked out okay, but if a few more student words had been further off-track, there would have been a problem: I would have run out of room on the board, and the board would have been populated with words that I anticipate would not have been helpful. I don’t think that my responses to words that I thought were unhelpful were very productive – I think I ended up in a middle ground between enthusiasm and unenthusiasm that probably neither made students feel encouraged nor explained why I wasn’t fully in agreement (see video below). In retrospect, I think I should have accepted all answers without hesitancy – and then, in the concluding whole-group discussion after the independent reading, asked them which words had been most useful. (I could also have written smaller so space wouldn’t have been a problem.) While I don’t feel like my responses discouraged any students from further participation, I could envision alternative scenarios with different students where that could have happened.
Lit - Skim words.avi from Jesse Gottschalk on Vimeo.
The guided reading portion felt quite successful: students were all eagerly searching the same page for sentences containing the words on the board, finding pieces of information but still hunting until eventually they found what they were looking for. While there was more cross-talk in this video than I would have liked, it is entirely task-centric – and, when it becomes clear that only one student has the floor, the other students tune in.
During partner work, while I stepped in with support or guidance in a few instances, I consciously made an effort to practice stepping back and letting the students have control of the room. I did float around throughout, letting students show me what they had written and giving suggestions and guidance as needed. On multiple occasions, when students showed me their work, I congratulated them – and then gave them a challenge to work on next, which I attempted to tailor in response to the work and engagement they had demonstrated so far. With one pair, for example, I asked them to try to find another food chain (either in the same text or a different one); in an instance with the other pair, feeling more confident that the students were ready to move to more a different difficult text, I challenged them to use the printed article next. The following video clip shows how one of those challenges played out. Now using a more advanced text, it is clear that the more advanced reader is in danger of leaving the less-advanced reader behind – he races through and she zones out, he gets the opportunity to practice skimming and she doesn’t. However, as soon as he finds a page he feels good about, he gets her attention and they begin to read together (the clip is shortened, but within the next 30 seconds after its end, they are both reading out of the book in chorus):
Lit - Find another from Jesse Science on Vimeo.
I witnessed some powerful evidence that the collaboration was supporting both students’ literacy development. In one pair, partners were frequently looking at a page together, while the more-proficient reader was reading the text aloud; in the other pair, I observed both engaged in discussing a illustrated food chain, while the more-proficient reader was using the text to clarify and inform their understanding of this food chain. The feedback that I received from my observers regarding the independent work was quite positive, and it certainly felt to me like this work was successful – students were engaged in reading, but also making use of the specific strategy that had been the subject of their mini-lesson.
The part of the lesson which I feel most strongly could have been improved upon was the final discussion, specifically the sharing of food chains that students had found. During my informal observation, I had only been shown the graphic organizers on which the students had written correct information; however, one student stepped up and shared an incorrect representation of a food chain. In the moment, I asked him if he had gotten it from the text or the pictures (the pictures, he admitted), then challenged the accuracy of a food chain that says that deer eat woodpeckers, which eat squirrels. I felt uncomfortable with my handling of the situation, but it was only in discussion with Kate later that we determined what a better course of action might have been: acknowledge that, through the picture, he’s found a good representation of the ecosystem, then ask him and his partner to return to that book and try to use the text to determine a food chain within that ecosystem.
The part of the lesson which I feel most strongly could have been improved upon was the final discussion, specifically the sharing of food chains that students had found. During my informal observation, I had only been shown the graphic organizers on which the students had written correct information; however, one student stepped up and shared an incorrect representation of a food chain. In the moment, I asked him if he had gotten it from the text or the pictures (the pictures, he admitted), then challenged the accuracy of a food chain that says that deer eat woodpeckers, which eat squirrels. I felt uncomfortable with my handling of the situation, but it was only in discussion with Kate later that we determined what a better course of action might have been: acknowledge that, through the picture, he’s found a good representation of the ecosystem, then ask him and his partner to return to that book and try to use the text to determine a food chain within that ecosystem.