Redo for 3rd Reflection for IPT 301

The lesson I observed was an interactive writing lesson. The lesson objective was for the students as a class to come up with a topic and sentence to write. It had to be something they all experienced together. Her strategy for teaching it was to do a guided learning lesson. It was supposed to be a review of what they had learned all year about writing sentences. She didn’t give them the topic to write on, but let them discuss among themselves what they would like to write on. As a class they decided they should pick three or four topics and then vote on which one to teach. During this part she simply asked questions to help get them thinking and would stand by students who were following the rule of five and contributing to the discussion. She was running a democratic classroom where she let the students be involved in their learning and actively participate in the lesson.

Once the students had picked a topic and decided on a sentence she stepped in to call on students to come up and write a word in the sentence. She helps the students remember the sentence they decided on, but won’t tell them what word they are supposed to write. She didn’t remind the first student that he should write the date. The student simply went up and did it first. Once the entire sentence was written she asked the students if it was all correct or did things need to be fixed. She once again didn’t tell them what needed to be fixed, but let them first say what they saw needed to be fixed, and let them come up a fix it. If they missed something then she would ask questions that guided them to it. After the sentence was correctly written students read the sentence out loud together.

All most all of the students were actively engaged in the lesson. The few who weren’t started participating would start participating when Mrs. McTeer came and stood by them, or called on them to come write a word. They seemed to enjoy coming up with the sentence and all followed the rule of five and raised their hands to speak. They had a ball to toss to the student speaking and only the student holding the ball could speak. Everyone followed this rule, although some impatiently waved their arms in the air for the student speaking to toss them the ball.

Principles of learning were effectively administered. Mrs. McTeer stated the lesson objective to the students before they began on the lesson. All students followed the behavior expectations that were set forth at the beginning of the lesson. She knew they would learn better by being able to participate so she planned her lesson around letting as many of them participate as possible. Finally she guided them through the lesson without them really even knowing it. Everything she wanted done in this lesson was accomplished.

The principles of teaching I noticed in this lesson were effectively administered. Some of the principles I noticed that she used well were first proximity to the students, withitness, and group alerting. The second two principles come from Kounins principles of teaching. When students weren’t participating or being a distraction to others, she would stand near them and let them know that she was there. This usually got most students to stop what they were doing and to pay attention. This was a guided learning lesson so she wasn’t doing all the teaching, but she was still attentive to how when the students needed help and how to guide them. She was also alert of the entire class and what they were doing during the lesson. If they were struggling she knew to ask them guiding questions or it they were distracting others she would come stand near to them, while still paying attention to the student who was writing.

The way she teaching as compared to my teaching is she does a lot of guided learning or discovery learning lessons, where I’m still do a lot of direct lessons. You can tell when she teaches that she is a lot more confident in what she is doing and knowing the information she is teaching to the students. Even though she knows the answers to most questions, she won’t automatically give the student the answer, instead she will post questions to help them think or ask other students if they can help answer the question. I sometimes will try to have other students answer the questions, but also do more me answering it instead of letting the students critically think about it.