Revised Lesson Plan
(Lesson Plan below)
Notes and Changes Prompted by My Partner’s Lesson
Teaching my lesson the week following my partner, I had the opportunity to observe her lesson and discuss it with her in depth before adjusting my own lesson plan. I found this extremely valuable; the following are some of the key observations which I made (both positive and constructive) and which Kate and I discussed prior to my revision of the plan (the relevant changes to the lesson plan are in italics).
Notes and Changes Prompted by My Partner’s Lesson
Teaching my lesson the week following my partner, I had the opportunity to observe her lesson and discuss it with her in depth before adjusting my own lesson plan. I found this extremely valuable; the following are some of the key observations which I made (both positive and constructive) and which Kate and I discussed prior to my revision of the plan (the relevant changes to the lesson plan are in italics).
- Kate did an excellent job of keeping students engaged in active listening by asking them specific questions to get them to respond to one another or paraphrase each other.
- Kate really effectively modeled her own thinking and use of the strategies.
- I added an emphasis on modeling of my own thought processes to the revised lesson plan.
- Students were quite engaged in the question and the task.
- The graphic organizers seemed like a valuable tool (both for the students and for the teacher’s assessment).
- I added a graphic organizer to my materials for the lesson.
- The lesson felt like several lessons condensed into one lesson, which constricted the available time to focus on any particular strategy.
- I removed all the introductory sections that didn’t directly support the task of reading to answer a particular question (such as having the students generate questions). The high levels of student engagement in Kate’s task were enough to convince me that my students could probably still find opportunities for active inquiry, even if I switched to a teacher-determined question. I also removed all instruction on skills apart from skimming.
- I also felt like a lesson about generating questions might be more valuable if it were placed at the end, rather than the beginning of the lesson, because by that point the students will have a sense of what kinds of questions they will be able to answer with the texts, and will be able to draw upon their prior experience with the books in generating questions.
- Most of the work of the lesson happened during the whole-group mini-lesson, rather than the partner work as planned, likely due to time constraints.
- Another reason I condensed and targeted the introductory sections – I wanted to try to provide the minimum amount of direct instruction in order to place the emphasis on their independent work.
- Some of the texts weren’t particularly relevant to the questions students were investigating.
- Since I was predetermining the question, I was able to pre-select a targeted number of texts that I knew would be useful to students in answering the guiding question.
- Some students collaborated impressively, effectively, and consistently; other students (at various points) were working more independently than collaboratively).
- I adjusted the structure of my partner task, to “require” some degree of collaboration while still leaving flexibility for students to differentiate the tasks they perform. I made sure to set aside a period before the partner task to lay out my expectations for both the task and their collaboration.
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