Reflection After teaching each lesson, write a Book Club Blog Posting discussing the following:
· What students learned and which students struggled with the lesson.
o Students are still struggling with understanding the genre of historical fiction. While I believe the worksheet has helped students understand the genre more and the discussion based around the book, they are still struggling. Students’ facial/body expression told me that they are still struggling with the concept. Perhaps roughly 10 students have a deeper understanding of the genre but are still struggling with the concept, while the rest of the class still has confusion understanding the genre. I would also say students are struggling with retelling. Only one student felt comfortable with retelling the story that was read. This shows me that students need the opportunity to really work with retelling. Through paired and class discussion, I would say most students (except 6 or so) are able to think critically about text. The criticalness of their thinking may not be extremely deep but they are able to discuss the book in a meaningful way.
· What are alternate reads of your students’ performance or products?
o Perhaps my students are able to retell, but are too afraid to speak in front of the class.
· What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?
o They are able to copy (take notes) from the board well, because students were able to full in the genre worksheet and the “dealing with change” chart.
· When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?
o During the unit we are re-hitting the objectives several times, therefore students who are struggling will have the opportunity to practice and become more familiar with the material later on in the unit.
· 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?
o I would not spend as much time on strategies at the beginning of the lesson. I felt I lost a lot of time on reading strategies. This would allow me to focus more on the “retelling” part of the lesson. I glossed over the retelling (even though this was an objective) because I spent too much time on the reading strategies portion of the lesson (and this was not even an objective of the lesson).
Reflection After teaching each lesson, write a Book Club Blog Posting discussing the following:
· What students learned and which students struggled with the lesson.
o Almost all students struggled with the constructive response. I predicted that they would have difficulty with this because they have struggled with this since the beginning of the year. Only 4 students responded to the question in a response that I thought fulfilled the question being asked. 9 students somewhat answered the response correctly (missing half the question). 4 Students completely missed the point of the writing prompt.
o Students are becoming more familiar with discussing the text critically. A number of students (7 to 10) had thoughtful ideas and thoughts about the chapter.
· What are alternate reads of your students’ performance or products?
o While the students had trouble writing their thoughts on paper, the students did well during the discussion. Through individual responses and body language, I think that the large majority of the class (baring 7ish students) understood how Moss felt about change. The difficulty came through having to write “how Moss felt about change” on paper. Therefore, they may have truly understood the constructive response question, but had difficulty writing down their thoughts.
· What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?
o Writing is hard. All students in the class (even the advance students) have difficulty writing down their thoughts in a cohesive manor. Often students will write ungrammatical sentences. I will ask the students to read the sentence back to me or I will read it to them and ask if the sentence makes sense. I would say roughly 95% of the time they respond with “yes”. I’m not sure if this is because of the verbal language they are use to using and hearing or if they are substituting words in their mind to make the sentence right but then not correcting it on the paper.
· When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?
o In the unit, we will continue working on constructive responses and writing in general. The more students are able to write, the better they will become. In each lesson, we will critically discuss the chapter read. This will help students who are struggling, to listen to others who are grasping the concept. Then hopefully the students will begin to think in critical ways about the text.
· 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?
o I would give more explicit instruction on the writing piece. I would write the lead/topic sentence (in response to the question). Then students would finish the response, because about half the class ends sentences with “because” for their topic sentence. This would be a way to scaffold students understanding of what a lead/topic sentence should look like.
Reflection After teaching each lesson, write a Book Club Blog Posting discussing the following:
· What students learned and which students struggled with the lesson.
o Students are becoming familiar with recognizing similes and metaphors. I saw this by the number of students standing up during the reading of the chapter. Students really struggled with writing similes and metaphors on their post cards. Only 4 students wrote two similes/metaphors, 1 student wrote one simile/metaphor, and the rest were not able two correctly write similes and/or metaphors.
o Therefore, students are able to recognize similes/metaphors quite well but when writing them, the class is struggling.
· What are alternate reads of your students’ performance or products?
o An alternate read, is that the students do not understand similes and metaphors. During the reading of the lesson, perhaps students were standing up because they saw other students standing up. They did not truly understand the definitions of similes/metaphors.
· What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?
o Students are not able to follow directions or an alternate view would be I did not explain the activity well enough for students to perform well.
o Students need explicit instruction when writing.
· When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?
o We could do another simile activity. I give the students two unlike items and then the students will have to create a simile with the items.
o I could also do a similar activity for metaphors. I give the students two unlike items and then the students will have to create a metaphor with the items.
o This would hopefully scaffold students toward writing their own similes/metaphors.
· 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?
o I would create a more detailed rubric for the postcard project. Students struggled with this activity. 3 or so students completely missed the purpose for writing the postcard and wrote whatever they wanted. 9 students tried to follow the directions but did not include both descriptions of the forest and what Moss was doing. They only included one description.
o To help with the confusion, I would give a more detailed rubric to the students. I think the students would have performed better if they would have had more explicit instruction. In the instructions I gave them, they had to extrapolate some information (which apparently was too hard).
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