Reflection Paper On Teaching A Lesson

Using what you have learned from the readings, discuss why you think lesson plans are important to teaching and which part(s) of the lesson plan will you find most helpful?

Planning- I think that the planning of this lesson went pretty smoothly. I had a strong idea of what I wanted to do going into planning the lesson. Therefore, writing the lesson was pretty easy. Creating the materials for the lesson was more time consuming that initially thought it would be. But, the time spent I think paid off in the end result of the lesson.

To begin with, the first element in creating a lesson plan would be an anticipatory set. An anticipatory set is used to activate students’ interest and get them ready to learn. When creating an anticipatory set teachers may want to consider students previous knowledge, learning styles, and interest. An anticipatory

I feel that the teacher in the presentation was adequately prepared. For example, at the biggining of their math lesson, she went over everything that the students had already learned and gave her students an overview of what they will learn in their lesson for that day.

It is important to examine the principles of teaching and technology standards, as well as school district and state curriculum guides and your results from observation. When preplanning for a lesson consider the ability level and learning style of the students you will be teaching. Before planning the lesson it's important to determine the goal and duration or your lesson.

One of the goals that I have set is to create lesson plans that will engage students and help them become critical thinkers. A lesson plan is an outline that teacher’s make for specific subjects that they teach throughout the day. When I sit down to create a lesson plan, I try not to just rely on the provided materials that a school provides. Generally, teachers are given a textbook, a workbook, and a teacher’s toolbox that has aids that can assist them when teaching.

To start, preparation is paramount at any level of education, but particularly at the most basic levels of education. In observing my peers teaching it was evident that the more prepared they were, the more successful the lesson would be. When it was my turn to teach I really tried to be prepared and to have a good plan in place so that my transitions and instructions would be smooth. The

“The very process of drawing up a plan encourages the teacher to reflect on how and why the content is chosen and sequenced and best presented” (Wallace, 2011:101). I chose a different range of methods including one to one, pair work, small group and whole group to suit all their learning styles (visual, auditory and kinaesthetic) and develop different skills. I planned various methods within the six hour sessions such as presentation, question & answer, small and whole group discussion, pair work, quiz, one to one, mixed grouping, IT research, spiral questioning and so on to help learners demonstrate their prior knowledge and experience as well as practise new skills such as building up their confidence while presenting, collaborating and sharing ideas and analysing and applying content instead of memorising. This would ensure that four active domains of progression- complexity, technical demand, familiarity and independence were covered properly. It is important to know your learners and their interests and use methods that help all of them learn.

As result of creating and implementing this artifact, I realized that the most effective lesson plans are those which initiate with the final assessment in mind. So, I applied a pre-test at the very beginning of my lessons with every different group I would be teaching to measure a starting point or the amount of pre-existing knowledge on the topics to be taught. Based on this, I planned the instruction to deliver and how to differentiate it.

Textbooks with their blueprints are generalized guides; therefore, new teachers need to know when to challenge their students further, structure their classrooms and prepare lesson plans that are effective, culturally responsive, and mindful. In other words, it is imperative that new teachers gain skills beyond a blueprint.

The first step is to find the right activity for the students. This may be a worksheet, a project, or a group activity. Find the materials that go with the lesson is crucial and may take quite a bit of time and research. The assignment need

My time this week was spent pulling resources from my second lesson. My lesson will fall on a short week. During short weeks, Ms. Davis introduces lessons that will be covered later in the year, or goes back and reviews. Students tend to lack focus during short weeks, so I am trying to keep that in mind. I don’t want to come up with anything too easy, but from what I understand the lessons leading up will not be heavy in content.

There are many different types of attachments that I have observed in the Magnolia classroom. Some are attachments to the children’s personal belongings and others are attachments to people, such as the teachers. Growing out of these attachments is good for the children’s social-emotional development.

As teachers, it is important to front-load the information.  When you do this, students are better prepared to engage in the conversations of the classroom, and be able to answer questions regarding the topic.  The ultimate result is that your needier students to feel successful.  Being flexible with your lesson plans is important, especially after gathering information from your classroom and having a firm understanding of what your students know.  Having this information provides you with a clue as to what you need to spend time on, things that you can quickly touch on, how to group your students, what organizers you may need or word banks that you can use.  If you find that some students are knowledgeable on the topic, they can be used as the teacher experts in the classrooms.  The final part of this Action Step is to do a post-assessment.  At this time you can ask the same questions as before or have them write 3 things they learned on a sticky note as an exit slip.  Teachers can use these assessments to help students who continue to struggle, pinpoint students who learn in a different way, or even find students who have already mastered the objective and may be ready to be

I felt very prepared for this lesson, mostly because I was super excited to share it with my peers and also because I spent quite a bit of time gathering and organizing my materials. Furthermore, I believe that the way that I developed my lesson, helped me to stay organized and prepared to teach it. I began by finding a standard and developing an objective from the standard. From there, I developed my formative assessment pieces, which were the activities for the stations. While I was developing the station activities, I realized that I needed an anticipatory set, and that’s when I decided that a video would be a nice change of pace from the worksheet based station activities. I loved how creative and engaging the video was, and my professor and peers agreed! Once the station activities were developed, I moved on to create the independent practice activity, which I decided to make Bingo, because who does not love a good game of Bingo? The closure consisted of a quick review of the material. I know that this process worked well, because I was able to process everything in a logical manner, and my assessments were directly derived from the objective, meaning that they will be testing the students’ knowledge of the objective.