Lesson Plan Reflection

While teaching my reading unit, I found that a lot of it did not go as expected. This isn’t a bad thing. I just realized throughout guided lead teaching that you cannot plan for everything. For my reading unit, I planned all of my lessons in advance. While teaching it, I found that I had to revise every single one of my lessons. Either we ran out of time because of how much discussion we had, I found something new that I wanted to do, or I altered the lesson so that their was chance for more participation and partner work.

I reflected on each and every one of my lessons and because of these reflections, ended up revising either the next days lesson plan or the rest of the weeks lesson plans because of something I noticed or thought of while teaching and reflecting. The first week of my Reading Street unit, the focus was on the comprehension skill and strategy compare/contrast and visualizing. There was also vocabulary that the students needed to learn and be able to apply in their own context. The lesson that I reflected the most on that week was my second lesson. In this lesson, we had a good discussion about what the students already knew about compare/contrast and visualizing, what we had talked about the day before, and different experiences they had with this skill and strategy. This discussion went very well and I found that it went longer than what I was expecting. I then read to the students a chapter of the book The Circuit, which is about a boy that is part of a migrant family. He shares his experiences in each chapter of the text. While I read, I modeled comparing and contrasting myself to the character, as well as when I visualized the text. I also had given students a sticky note and told them the purpose of the sticky note was to take notes on things they found were alike and different between the character and them while I was reading. After reading the chapter, the students shared examples they found of comparing/contrasting themselves with the main character, as well as parts that they visualized while reading. The students were able to give me a lot of really good examples of both the skill and strategy. After our discussion, I then explained how to make a Venn diagram using the examples. I found while doing this that some of the students seemed bored. While reflecting on my lesson, I realized that something I didn’t do was pre-assess the student’s prior experiences with Venn diagrams. I knew that each of them had seen one but I did not assess whether they had made one themselves and knew how to make one. I realized afterward that I should have applied the students more during my modeling and explained how to make it while including the students. When writing my examples into the Venn diagram, I could have used the students for help in asking where each thing should go, etc. Once the Venn diagram was done, I moved on to a vocabulary activity. In this activity, we read a section of text in the Reading Street book and practiced using context clues to help figure out the meaning of the vocabulary words. I explained to the students how to do this, and made up an example where I used context clues to figure out the meaning of an unknown vocabulary word. After this, I had the students read and practice using context clues with the first word in a whole group setting. I then found that we had run out of time and could not do this with the rest of the vocabulary in the text.

After my lesson, I had the help of my field instructor in reflecting on my lesson. We agreed that the beginning discussion had gone too long and ended in the vocabulary activity having to be shortened. Although I really enjoyed that our discussion went well and that many of the students were participating, I do think that I could have slimmed it up and possibly had the students write in their reading journals and only share a few examples so that we had more time for the vocabulary practice. Due to spending so much time on the skill and strategy, none of my students seemed to struggle with it. I made sure to check in with students at all different levels during our discussion and while sharing examples so that I had an idea of where everyone was at. This being said, students did not receive as much instructional time on the vocabulary. During the vocabulary activity, I was having them practice using context clues to figure out the meaning of words. If more time had been given to that, students could have practiced more how to do this and understood why it was purposeful. The vocabulary is very important for the students to know and because the discussion went longer than I had predicted, there was less time for it and it affected their understanding and application of the vocabulary. Therefore, I revised my next day’s lesson so that students were given more academic support in this area and were given the opportunity to practice and apply the vocabulary words. Something that I noticed while we were practicing the strategy and skill and reading the text was that students after the chapter was read, students were making inferences about why things happened, as well as predictions as to what would happen next. This was not something that was part of my objective, but I fed off of it and had the students explain why they thought that. I was really happy to see that they were using prior knowledge of other comprehension skills and strategies to help them in understanding the text. Another thing that was noticed while I was teaching, and earlier said, is that the students seemed bored while I was explaining the Venn diagram. I do think that if I had pre-assessed the student’s experiences with Venn diagrams that I could have applied them more while I was modeling because they already knew a lot of what I was talking about. Also during my reflection, I wished that I had included more partner work for the students instead of being almost entirely whole group discussion. I know that the students really enjoy working in partners. Therefore, I revised my next day’s lesson and had them work with a partner of their choice to fill out a Venn diagram comparing/contrasting one of the partner’s with the main character of the book. On the back of the Venn diagram, I had them practice visualizing by drawing a scene they remembered from the book. This proved to be a lot of fun for the students and I was able to walk around and talk with them about this assignment and see how they were able to apply the skill and strategy for that week.

Overall, I thought that the lesson went really well. There were some changes I would have made, such as shortening the discussion on the strategy and skill and spending more time practicing the strategy and skill and also understanding the week's vocabulary words. Although the discussion was good, it would have been more purposeful to put more of a focus on the strategy and skill in action, rather than talking about it. Also, the vocabulary words are important for the students to know, therefore more time spent learning and applying them benefits their learning. I also would have incorporated more partner work into this lesson, such as developing the context clues activity into a whole group and then partner work activity and also turning the venn diagram activity into a partner activity like I did for the next day's lesson. The students seem to work really well with partners and enjoy doing interactive activities, therefore I would incorporate more of it if I were to teaching this lesson again. What I learned from my reading units overall is that you cannot expect things to go as planned. Making reflections and revisions was a continuous thing, and I saw that because of the reflections and revisions made that the unit went great, flowed well, and was effective for the students. I really enjoyed teaching my reading unit and I'm excited to continue to teach reading and gain more experience with teaching, lesson planning, and developing units.