Student and Teacher Feedback
My lesson was about poetry about time, and how it has changed over time. I allowed my students to select their own poem from the ones that I provided. Each poem had a short biography attached. Students then read over their poem and biography, and completed the formative assessment worksheet. In the following lesson, students would have been expected to do a close reading of their poem and write a short summary about what it was about. How to do a close reading would have been taught to them in the lesson as well. Students would be assessed on their summary after class, and would work further with their poem later in the unit.
In this lesson, I encompass the part of the Mission Statement Pillar that states:
"Our graduates are creative and integrative educators:
They are adept at both discipline-based and interdisciplinary teaching methods, using emerging technologies, social interaction, and imagination to support students’ achievement of rigorous academic standards. Understanding the connection between intellectual and emotional-social growth, they help their students gain self-knowledge and assume responsibility for their own learning."
This lesson is grounded in English, but knowledge about history is necessary in order to facilitate student learning on this topic. This lesson was grounded on group discussion with teacher guidance for students to collaborate on ideas that are new to them. As a class, they built off from each others imaginations in order to form their own beliefs. The answers were not given to them, but they were given the tools they needed in order to find the answers on their own. The depth in which they went was up to them.
I feel that in my lesson this portion of the pillar was met with the exception of integrating emerging technologies. Using technology more frequently is a tool that I hope to rely more heavily on in the future. If I had been able to teach both lessons back to back, I would have taken into account how much my group did well with group discussion. I formatted a "double lesson" with the intention that whatever was not finished in the first portion would carry onto the next lesson. This worked well as we ended right where I was expecting we would. The next lesson would have focused more heavily on teaching how to close read poetry, which I would have a more hands-on class, due to the learning styles of my group that I observed in the first lesson.
My worksheet in my first lesson was a formative assessment that would prepare my students for the close reading and summary writing that they would be working on in the following class. The worksheet itself would be a helpful tool for them to guide their thinking. The close reading and summary writing of the poem would be a summative assessment, that directly correlates with one of the standards for the unit.
I learned that the "mystery excerpt" activity that I added at the end of writing my lesson was one of the most impactful parts of the lesson for the students, because they could use their imaginations, and it worked as a bridge to connect their ideas with the knowledge they were about to gain. I realized that I do not know what to do with myself while my students are individually working, however, and this is something that I will have to figure out in the future. In the observation of instruction in both my literacy and curriculum courses, I felt especially comfortable with the class collaboration atmosphere that I was intending to implement in my mini-lessons.
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