Discuss the following:
· What students learned and which students struggled with the lesson.
· What are alternate reads of your students’ performance or products?
· What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?
· When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?
· If you were to teach this same lesson again, what would you do differently and how do you think the changes would improve students’ learning?
Over the course of a ten-day unit plan, my students learned how to construct a 4-paragraph essay by writing each paragraph – the introduction, body and conclusion paragraphs – one day at a time. Students are expected to write a 5-paragraph essay by the end of the year. The purpose of this lesson was to transition students into writing 5 paragraphs without overwhelming them. My school uses a standard graphic organizer to create 5 paragraph essays. In order to familiarize students with using graphic organizer, I used a graphic organizer for all of the paragraphs.
ReplyDeleteDuring this unit, I focused students learning on writing a well-organized paragraph – e.g., indentation, topic sentences, supporting details and closing sentences. Most students struggled with writing a topic sentence and closing sentence. I drilled into my students’ head that the topic sentence tells the reader what the paragraph is about. I gave examples of topic sentences and students had to tell me the only things that they could then write about. For example, when I said “Birds can fly”, students would tell me that the only supporting details for which students could write were details about birds flying. Although, students were able to repeat this, they still gave me supporting details for the topic sentences. I had extreme difficulty connecting students’ knowledge of what a topic sentence is and actually applying that information. When writing closing sentences, my students understood that a closing sentence just restates the information in the topic sentence. The problem is that my students have difficulty rewriting sentences in their own words. For example, while modeling a paragraph about Fall, my topic sentence read [f]all is a colorful season, and all of the sentences that follows read about the how the leaves are all different colors, none of my students could come up a way to restate the topic sentence in a way that did not repeat exactly what they said in the first sentence. I learned, through this unit, that my students really struggled with rewording.
My students’ difficulty with creatively expressing themselves during the unit, I believe stemmed from overly modeling activities. Students were able to talk about how paragraphs are constructed but had difficulty constructing them themselves. During literacy, my CT has done a lot of modeling and I believe that students have learned that as long as them copy what the teacher does, they will get full points and, most importantly … not have to do the work over again. Unfortunately, my students have become very good at copying models, but not very good at thinking for themselves. When working on the graphic organizer as a class, most students would use the exact same sentence construct as I; only substituting my personal facts for their own. While teaching the next unit, I really need to work on weaning my students off of models. I really want my students to understand my expectations but I also want them to be able to think for themselves.
If I were to reteach this lesson, I would implement a mini lesson on how to restate sentences. Students were, for the most part unsuccessful at restate sentences and this inferred with their ability to write paragraphs on their own. I think that if I had promoted this skill, the unit as a whole would have been more successful.