Phase 3
Describe (a) how
your understandings for each the categories listed below changed based on your
experiences (Both your teaching and assessing others' teaching) this semester
and (b) describe how this might impact your future teaching experiences.
Assessing Prior Knowledge
I always knew that learning about the students
prior knowledge about the lesson content was important I just didn’t relate
that to giving the students a pretest before the start of the lesson. I knew that before each unit it would be good
to test the students’ knowledge about the subject yet to give the students a
pretest for each lesson seems a lot for just one lesson. I can see having a discussion with the
students to determine what the students’ prior knowledge is. I like the idea of giving the students a
pretest on certain lesson plans just not every lesson. When I was looking at my classmates’ lesson
plans I could pick out which lesson plans the teacher and students would
benefit in a pretest and other lessons that probably do not need a pretest to
determine the students’ prior knowledge.
Planning Instruction
My thinking about
planning a lesson plan has not changed because I know that the standards and the
objective are important thing to think about when planning a lesson. The objective, standards and assessment all
need to relate to one another and are appropriate for the grade level. Throughout this semester, I think in everyone’s
lesson plan they thought about what grade and standard they wanted to focus on
and how the students were going to meet the standards through the objective and
assessment of the lesson.
Designing Instruction
When I design a
lesson plan, I write out how I would present it in a classroom. I want other teachers to be able to read my
lesson plan and use it in their classroom as well. I want the transitions to flow smoothly and
not have the students going from the carpet to their seats back to the carpet
again in one lesson. I am learning how
to write objectives where Bloom’s Taxonomy can be incorporated into the lesson
plan to target the students’ higher order thinking skills. I do try to incorporate technology in my
lessons if it is related to the lesson content.
I think I will be using YouTube a lot in my classroom because the
website does have some good videos that would be helpful to the students. This class has also showed me different
websites that you be helpful to the students as well. When I do use the different websites I will
have to make sure, I talk to the students about being careful when they are
online as well.
Planning Assessment
Planning assessment
is important when planning a lesson plan because you want the assessment to see
if the students met the objective and understood what they were learning. It is also hard because there can be many
ways to assess the students knowledge.
It is also good to think about all the different ways that students learn
and how to incorporate them into your lesson plan. THE lesson plans that I saw this semester had
this with their technology because not all students learn the same way and if the
teacher had a video for the students to understand the information this was
meeting the students needs.
Instructional Decisions/Teaching
I am already used
to presenting a lesson in front of students because of the practicum’s I had so
far and also teaching to adult pretending to be students as well and I think it
is harder to teach in front of adults that children. When you teach to adults, you expect them to
already know the stuff in your lesson plan and it can become silly at times as
well. This does help when you are in
front of students because we are able to see what kind of mistakes we should
not make. This can help in the future to
have your peers/colleagues to watch you perform a lesson to see where you need
to improve of what you have done well.
Assessment of Learning
The peer survey
was helpful because we were able to receive anonymous feedback on our lesson on
what went well and what areas we still need to improve. It was constructive criticism
that will help us when we are making a lesson plan or presenting in front of
the students. This is the first time that
we did a peer survey to get feedback from our peers. I think peer feedback is something that I
would like to get from my fellow teachers in the future.