Reflection #5 - Effective Lessons

Describe 

For this weeks reading it covered effective lessons and the various types of instruction.  The reading began with direct instruction and how to create an effective lesson using this strategy.  Although everyone may teach a wide variety of students the parts of an effective lesson are the same for all learners.  These key parts are objectives, build on prior knowledge, and figure out the best way to reach these goals while assessing understanding and providing feedback.

Analyze

Developing effective lessons must be a systematic process.  It must start with a clear set of learning objectives.  Once those are complete, an effective lesson than gets a list of all prerequisite skills or concepts needed to complete the learning process.  This phase is extremely important to know them as well as assess your students for them.  This process allows an educator to then create organizers and activities to help students better understand the concept.  After an understanding of prerequisite skills and concepts is developed the learning of new material can begin.  This is the only part of lesson development that does not give me anxiety!  Being about to develop examples, gather images, charts/diagrams, videos, activities to help students understand concepts is exciting.  I love finding new ways to share with students as well as other staff members at my school.

Reflect

When writing lesson plans the part of the whole process that I forget about and struggle with during implementation is allowing for ample student response time and also providing the right amount of independent practice.  When reviewing material in class and asking students questions I struggle with giving response time.  As a history teacher, these ideas/concepts/dates have come easy to me and I have been working with this material a long time.  Sometimes I tend to get a little impatient.  I must continue to work on this!  The other area of struggle for me is when I develop differentiation for students and they are working in their ability groups I struggle with giving them appropriate time to complete practice and than share with their group.  The struggle is ensuring that all students have time to work and than have time to share.  Technology does allow me to balance this a little better but it is an area of weakness for me.  The last area of weakness for me is providing students with ample feedback in the appropriate time between completing activities.  When grading performance tasks for over 100 students it is hard to give feedback to everyone that can help them to improve.  My problem is dealing with time to get it all back and allow them to get better.  This is especially hard with essays and feedback with my AP students for preparation for the exam in May.