Week 11
In the last week, I spent a fair amount of my time thinking about the things I needed to do in order to improve upon my teaching craft based on the feedback I received during my first Formal Observation in order to prepare for my second Formal Observation on Friday. I have been focusing on my pacing the most because I had struggled to get through lessons because activities took longer than originally planned or we get off topic for a few minutes and we are unable to complete exit tickets . Furthermore, I wanted to work on improving my cold calling as well as getting more students involved through every problem to evaluate understanding more often.
One way that I worked to improve my pacing was to use a timer for everything that my students do. From their warm-up to their group work, I would give them five minutes to try the problem. If groups were struggling, then I could extend the time by a minute or two if necessary. Adding a time limit forces students to continue to push forward without any down time until they are finished. Another thing that I did for cold calling was create a post it note that had the number for each table of desks and would put a tally after calling a student from each table in order to reach each table without leaving any table felt left out of a lesson.
I found the post it note helpful as a way to keep myself from calling on any person or table too often. Furthermore, I felt as though my ability to stop the group activity when many groups had the same mistake was good because it allowed me to address misconceptions that many people had.
All in all, my lesson went very well. When I was finished, I felt like a rockstar and knew that I had done a great job with the lesson. I was so confident that every time I had something to do ask a question, stop the class, or give feedback I felt my level of confidence grow as well as the amount of fun I was having as well. My students learned the material and my administration could see that. The feedback I got was extremely exciting with them suggesting to continue to build upon this with me working less and the students working harder, having more fun and presence, and continuing to ask good questions.
In Principles to Actions book, page 35, it reads about posing purposeful questions to students. It sounds like you are gaining in your comfort with questions to assess student understanding and guiding students to try to find the answer. Page 39 talks about funneling vs focusing the questions as we discussion in ED 640. Page 41 helps us teachers with what the teacher vs student is doing in the classroom as a lesson is progressing. Great job! It sounds like great timing for the book, "5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions" they talk about anticipating, monitoring, selecting, sequencing, and connecting as the 5 practices you can do in your classroom to assist with your guide to student thinking. Way to go Reid!
ReplyDelete