June Blog: First Lesson Reflections

My first real lesson with live children was on comparing and contrasting plant cells and animal cells. What went well? Direct instruction is what I’m most comfortable with, so I stuck with it and my lesson was went very well.  For my set I wanted them to get some practice comparing and contrasting characteristics of something familiar to them, so I naturally decided that regular Cheetos vs. Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (hot chips) was highly appropriate. The students were engaged and they did a great job picking out similarities and differences. During the guided practice I did a pretty good job of getting the students engaged by having them come up to the board and point to things they recognized in plant cells and animal cells. Guided practice was also very effective since I used paddleboards after we had already established a strong paddle board procedure.

What did I do poorly? My angles when walking around the room weren’t that great. At certain times I did not have the whole class in view which opens up a window of opportunity for students to misbehave. Something else that I did not consider beforehand is that these students have a hard time listening and copying notes at the same time. They also don’t know what to write down in their notes if I don’t explicitly tell them what to copy. Another oversight was the need to give them well-structured guided notes so that they know how to structure their notes. Additionally, I had a tendency to truncate student responses once I got the answer out of them that I wanted which made it seem like I didn’t care about what the students really had to say.

My expectation

What really happened

What was unexpected?/What thoughts were going through my head? I was unsure about how the students would respond to the set, so I was pleasantly surprised that the students were in to it. I also did not think that high school students would want to get out of their seats and point to things on the screen. Apparently students will take hold of any opportunity to leave their seats.  As the lesson progressed  I was glad that things were going well, but there was a point where I realized that the only reason why the lesson was successful in terms of teaching to the objective was because the objective was super easy. The whole time I was freaking out about how I would ever be able to teach a DOK 3 objective that requires students to string together different pieces of material from multiple lessons.