Teaching Metaphor Revisited

After having taught a full unit this semester, I believe that my orignal teaching metaphor still stands. While I was teaching my unit, I did feel like a conductor of a band at many times. I had to organize all of my lessons just like a conductor plans rehersals. I had to think about what my students already knew and base my teaching on their prior knowledge base. Just as a band needs new pieces to work on that challenge their existing skill level, so to does a class of students need new material to work with and learn that challenges their existing knowledge. However, a band cannot be given a piece that is too complicated for its members to play. If this happens, the band will not grow and develop new skills. Instead, the band members will become frustrated with failure. In the same way, I had to make sure that I was targeting my students at their instructional level and not giving them material that was too difficult. Sometimes it was hard to find this delicate balance.

My class was also composed of many different students with different skills, backgrounds, and interests. Just as a band must learn how to play euphonious music with all of its various instruments, so too did I have to learn how to teach a group of very different students so that they all learned and benefitted from my instruction. Although this process was not easy and took a lot of effort, it was definitely worth it. Just as a conductor smiles and bows proudly after his band has played a piece successfully, so too did I smile and bow in my own head after a successful lesson.

Summative Assessment

Our summative assessment consisted of multiple choice and short answer questions. We constructed our assessment in this way partly because our teacher said that she usually uses multiple choice questions and likes to include questions from past SOL tests, and partly because we wanted our students to be able to show us what they knew rather than just recognizing what they knew in a multiple choice question.

At the end of our fifth lesson, we gave our students a review worksheet that had all of the questions we asked them during the review game and an answer key to help them study for their test. We thought this would be beneficial to our students because scheduling conflicts made it so that they would not be able to take our test until almost a week after we had finished teaching the unit. We also wanted to give them a worksheet with information on it since they did not have a textbook or any other papers to look at to study. It seems a little weird to me that they do not take notes or have a book to highlight. I know I did not know how to take notes in third grade either, but now that I have been taking notes for years, I do not remember what it was like to learn, or study for a test without them. I did have a textbook in third grade to study from though. I think that getting away from textbooks is a great idea and can often make learning a lot more interesting and in depth, but I am not sure what students use to study then. Do teachers give them other information in worksheets? Or do they just remember things a lot more easily at that age?

Our students did really well on our summative assessment. Almost everyone in the class got all of the answers right and those that did not only missed one or two questions. I was really happy to see this. It made me feel good to know that our students actually did learn what we wanted them to learn and that they were able to retain the information. The only question I am left with is: does this mean we did a really good job of teaching and that our students really understood the concepts, or could it possibly mean that our test was too easy and we should have made more complex questions?

Although teaching this unit took a lot of time and effort, I really enjoyed teaching it. It makes me feel good to know that I can teach an entire unit and that my students will learn. I feel a lot more confident in my teaching abilities now!

Fifth Lesson

Alison and I taught our fifth and last lesson together. It was nice to be able to work together again and I really was not nervous at all going into this lesson, even though this was when we were being observed, because I had already taught two lessons successfully on my own. I think teaching by myself gave me more confidence in my teaching abilities.

This lesson went really well and our timing worked out nicely so that we had enough time to do everything we had planned. This lesson was on recycling and conservation as well as a review for the test. We started out by having our students recall things we had talked about previously in the unit because we could not teach this last lesson until almost a week after we had taught our previous lessons. I was pleasantly surprised by how much they remembered. They touched on things from each of our previous lessons which made me feel more comfortable about how much they had learned. Then we went through a PowerPoint presentation on things regarding recycling and conservation. We went through this quickly because, based on our preassessment and by observing our students during the previous lessons, they seemed to have a pretty good grasp on these concepts already.

After the PowerPoint we had the students participate in a trash bag sort. We explained the directions to them and then split them into groups. However, when we told each group to move to a certain location, confusion ensued and half of our students did not seem to know which group they were in. I think this was partly caused by the fact that we counted them off 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. and this was probably a more confusing way to divide them. When I had to divide the students into groups to do the experiments in lesson two, I just divided them by where they were sitting and this worked well. However, Alison said that she used the counting off method in one of her previous lessons and it worked just fine so I do not know what happened there. I did learn though that no matter what system you use to break students into groups, you must be sure to be clear and to repeat instructions so that they know what they are supposed to do. Once we had cleared up the confusion about who was in which group, the trash bag sort went well. Each group seemed to have some really good conversations about what could be recycled or not. We did run into some problems when we were going over the sort though because there were a few items that even Alison and I were not sure of and some of the items were difficult to explain. I realized that knowing something and knowing something well enough to teach it are two very different things. If I were to teach this lesson again, I would make sure I knew exactly what could be recycled or not and why and how to explain it to my students.

After the trash bag sort, we played a Jeopardy-style game to help our students review for their unit test. I was very happy with how the review game went because all of our students seemed to know the answers to just about all of the questions. Not only did they know the answers, but they could also explain their reasoning and why one answer was correct and not another. The only problem we had with this part of the lesson was that we could not decide how students should answer the questions. We did not want it to be just whoever raised their hand first answered the question because then it would have been two or three students answering all of the questions. We decided that we would have each student take a turn, one student on one team and then one student on the other team to answer questions back and forth so that everyone got a chance to answer a question. This worked well and I was impressed by how good our students were at being quiet and waiting for their turn. However, there were problems with this method and we lost some students' attention because they knew their turn was not coming up soon so they did not really need to pay attention. If I could reteach this lesson, I would come up with a better method of playing the game so that even though one student at a time was getting to answer a question, the other students would still be involved and need to be paying attention.

Overall, I think our lesson went well and we accomplished what we wanted to get done.

Third and Fourth Lessons

Since Alison taught these lessons, I do not have too much to say about them. When we were planning them, lesson four, which was about how plants and animals interact, seemed like it would be more fun because we planned a food chain scenario activity for our students to do. We could not think of anything too exciting for our students to do during lesson three that would correlate well to our objectives for the lesson. Lesson three was about how humans affect the environment and we decided they could do a journal prompt writing response for this lesson. I think these two lessons represent a good use of backward design. We could have found a really cool and fun activity for our students to do for lesson three, but it probably would not have been in alignment with out instructional goals and objectives. This is why we chose to do the journal prompt instead. It still gave the students something interesting to do, and it also required them to use critical thinking skills to show that they really understood the lesson.

After talking to Alison about the lessons, they seemed to go well. She said the journal prompt question for lesson three was a little vague and probably could have elicited better responses from our students if it had been more specific. She said that our students definitely seemed to understand the lesson though. Lesson four went really well. Since our students had already learned about food chains, this lesson built on nicely to what they already knew and helped them think about food chains in new ways. She said they did a really good job on the food chain scenario activity, and came up with some interesting and creative ideas with the information they were given.