Monday, October 14
This week was a different then our normal fieldwork schedule because Bishop Dunn had Monday off. We had class instead in Aquinas 57. This gave us some time to reflect on our inquiry lesson and learn what our peers thought about our execution.
We first reflected as a group about how we thought our lesson went and what could have gone better overall. Once we went though a step-by-step of our lesson, which included the introduction (reflection of last class/Tagxedo), exploratory introduction (Google presentation), inquiry (artifact bag exploration), expansion (recording sheets), closure (sharing findings with the class), elaboration (independent practice homework worksheet), Dr. Smirnova opened the floor up for our classmates to share their thoughts. Overall, our peers seemed to enjoy our lesson. They liked the use of artifact bags and how we modeled our lesson and thinking process for the students to see.
Dr. Smirnova gave us the following critiques from our lesson:
-Tagxedo- Use contrast to make the words on the Tagxedo more clear.
-Always allow time for students to answer. If students are not answering, rephrase the question and pause to allow time to think.
-Inquiry Steps: Split up list onto different slides. This would make this section of the lesson more engaging and more time for question/answer.
-Give each student in the group a job. Assigning roles will save time.
I think that these critiques can be used to help us make our future lessons more effective. Some things that she points out are things that we, as a group, have not noticed or would not know how to fix. I really like this time that we are given to reflect on our lessons. Though as a teacher you will not have too much time in between lessons to reflect, this is a good practice to start now.
Wednesday, October 16
We were also in our classroom today, but instead of focusing on reflections, we moved our focus to current events. Christina, Courtney, and Kristen presented a lesson on the 5 W's: who, what, when, where, and why. The 5 W's are important in figuring out what an article is about. The article chosen was one about the government shutdown. I really liked how they chose a topic that was repeatable and students would have heard about.
After reading the article, we completed a 5 W's worksheet, filling in important information from the article. After filling out these sheets, we were to pass them to our neighbor and use the information provided to write an introductory paragraph to the topic.
I liked this method of organizing information and making this activity cross curriculum. Students learn how to pull out valuable and important facts, display them in an easy to read way, and write an introduction paragraph. I think that the idea of using this in a classroom where each student/group has a different article and then switching with a new person would be a good idea. Students would not know about the article and would have to base their paragraphs solely on the information provided by their peers.
Friday, October 18
Today marked the day of our last lesson. Though I was anxious about teaching our final lesson, I knew that we had a great group of students who were eager to learn.
We started off the lesson by playing a quick vocabulary game to get students familiar with cooperative learning. We assigned the students in each small group a number 1-3 or 1-4 depending on the number of students. Then, we passed out index cards containing one vocabulary word on each: artisan, merchant, manor, and apprentice. Students were instructed to talk with their group members to come up with a definition for their assigned word. The catch? They were not able to write anything down and all group members had to know the definition. Once the time was up, my fellow teachers and myself picked a random number 1-3 (or 1-4 is applicable) for the students with the corresponding number to share their word and their definition. We bridged this activity to our lesson by having students tell us if this was an effective method of working and if working with others is good or bad.
We based our lesson off of a Google Presentation about social skills. These skills are needed to work effectively within groups.
These hints are very important for students to remember during their group work. One of the words in this slide, respect, is a vague term. When this word was mentioned, I had the students provide some examples of what it means to be respectful. I think that in doing this, the students had a better understanding of the word.
We continued our lesson by breaking up the teachers into the four groups to create their "secret presentation." James taught the song group, Lindsay taught the advertisement, Alex taught the poem, and Madison and myself taught the skit. In my group, we first had a group mixed with two girls and one boy. Madison and I created a brief skit about the ocean to model for the students what a skit was. This group quickly caught on and created a cute skit about colonial life.
The next group that we had was all girls. They were very interested in talking, but not about the task at hand. When we finally got them to write the skit, they focused more on the children part than on the colonial part. They wrote a skit about friends walking home from school talking about a birthday party. Though this was not exactly what we were looking for, it was still a great experience for the students to have different types of activities to be a part of.
After each lesson, we had the groups share their creations with the rest of the class. The students were very happy to get up in front of their peers and share what they had done. All of the students had on big smiles and seemed to be enjoying themselves.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time teaching at Bishop Dunn. I wish that I could continue to teach, but sadly it is time for my group to sit back and observe the other groups. This has been a great experience for me and I will remember the lessons that I have learned to use in my future classroom.
We started off the lesson by playing a quick vocabulary game to get students familiar with cooperative learning. We assigned the students in each small group a number 1-3 or 1-4 depending on the number of students. Then, we passed out index cards containing one vocabulary word on each: artisan, merchant, manor, and apprentice. Students were instructed to talk with their group members to come up with a definition for their assigned word. The catch? They were not able to write anything down and all group members had to know the definition. Once the time was up, my fellow teachers and myself picked a random number 1-3 (or 1-4 is applicable) for the students with the corresponding number to share their word and their definition. We bridged this activity to our lesson by having students tell us if this was an effective method of working and if working with others is good or bad.
We based our lesson off of a Google Presentation about social skills. These skills are needed to work effectively within groups.
We continued our lesson by breaking up the teachers into the four groups to create their "secret presentation." James taught the song group, Lindsay taught the advertisement, Alex taught the poem, and Madison and myself taught the skit. In my group, we first had a group mixed with two girls and one boy. Madison and I created a brief skit about the ocean to model for the students what a skit was. This group quickly caught on and created a cute skit about colonial life.
The next group that we had was all girls. They were very interested in talking, but not about the task at hand. When we finally got them to write the skit, they focused more on the children part than on the colonial part. They wrote a skit about friends walking home from school talking about a birthday party. Though this was not exactly what we were looking for, it was still a great experience for the students to have different types of activities to be a part of.
After each lesson, we had the groups share their creations with the rest of the class. The students were very happy to get up in front of their peers and share what they had done. All of the students had on big smiles and seemed to be enjoying themselves.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time teaching at Bishop Dunn. I wish that I could continue to teach, but sadly it is time for my group to sit back and observe the other groups. This has been a great experience for me and I will remember the lessons that I have learned to use in my future classroom.
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