Week 2

LESSON REFLECTION

Candidate: Katie Taylor

Lesson Topic: Reading

Taught: Finding the main idea of individualized fictional text to help  improve reading comprehension. Students will do this by finding supporting details and determining what the most important part of the text is. 

What went well: I was happy with how my students participated in their small group activity. I was really impressed with how the older students handled watching the video with the IPad and doing the task cards. They seemed to work really well together and understand the task at hand. I enjoyed working with the middle group students. They did a great job staying on task and filling in their graphic organizer. By having small groups it was helpful to have partners work together and myself work with students who may need a bit of extra support. I think the students did a great job staying engaged and completing their assignments. I liked incorporating movement into my lesson by using the task cards. 

Date: 7/11/22 

What did not go as planned: I planned for the students to all do small group activities based on their individualized needs and their reading levels. I planned for Sam to work with Miss M on a passage reading and answer comprehension questions about the passage. Sam completed his passage with Miss M much faster than anticipated. I did not have an early finisher assignment for Sam. I had plans for him to read but Miss M was wonderful and took the initiative and had him form works with letter tiles. This was very helpful. I also struggled a bit to get the students engaged and actively participating in the mini lesson and beginning of the lesson. I believe this is due to the early Monday morning. As we got into the lesson the students started to open up and be more engaged in the lesson. 

I also did not include in my lesson plan an objective for each student that aligned with a goal that can be measured and assessed. I instead created an objective that was the overall learning target for the whole lesson and every student in general. When developing my lesson I was under the impression I was developing a formative lesson and no true assessment was occurring. I now understand that within a lesson informal observations and formative work can go towards a student achieving their goal or objective for that lesson. I also did not include a crisis plan. This is important to include in case there is an emergency while teaching. 

Within my lesson I did have high leverage practices, but they were not underlined and easy to identify. I used practices such as breaking my students up into homogenous small groups, partner work, turn-and-talks, video integration, task cards, and anchor charts. I also did not include references and supported research about why these practices are high-leverage practices. Lastly, I did not explicitly state my reasons as to why I chose the text I chose and how it is benefiting my students and their cultural diversity. 

How to change for subsequent lessons: In my next lesson I will make sure the hook of my lesson is very engaging. I want my students to all want to participate and be excited about what they are learning. I will also make sure all of my small groups have equal amounts of work when it comes to timing. If a student does finish early I will include pre-planned early finisher assignments that can help further reinforce the standards we are assessing. 

In my next lesson I will make sure to include all of the pieces that I missed in this lesson. I will make sure to read the rubric thoroughly and have detailed reasoning in my lesson plan. I want to make sure my lesson is culturally inclusive and involves many highly researched high-leverage practices. I want to make sure my high-leverage practices are underlined, so they are easy to find. I also want to make sure I have a detailed crisis plan in case of an emergency. 

Finally, I want to make sure that my lesson is beneficial to all my students. By creating individualized objectives for each student, this will allow me as their teacher to be more intentional with how I teach and accommodate and modify their instruction so they can achieve their goals.