Danielle's Final Reflection

Based on your experiences this semester, answer the questions below based upon (a) how your understandings for each the questions and sub-categories listed below changed and (b) describe how this might impact your future teaching experiences.

1. What did you learn from your simulated teaching experience about:


Assessing Prior Knowledge

I learned how important assessing prior knowledge is because your students might not be developmental ready for that material or your students may already know the material.  Knowing what your students know and what they don’t will help you significantly with planning your lesson.  Not all students are ready for the same material at the same time this is key to remember.  In my lesson we had pre-assessments to know what our students knew so that if they all already knew this information we would not focus on it as much as the information the students did not know much about.  This will impact my future teaching because I will use pre-assessments as the base of my teaching.

Planning & Designing Instruction vs. Actually Teaching [i.e. What instructional decisions or changes did you make & why?]

We made our power point longer than we had planned.  We felt we needed more direct instruction instead of letting the students free with content they may had not yet mastered.  We changed the book we read allowed because they did not have it at the library up here but I think we got a more engaging book in the end so I did not mind changing it.  We also added a video to incorporate more technology to support learning other than just learning from the power point. My ideas have changed a bit about this category because I realized how teachers review and go over lesson ideas and realize sometimes that they need to make changes to have the biggest impact on their students.  This will impact my future teaching experiences because it will show that just because you are planning something that does not mean it will be the final draft of that.  Sometimes you have to make changes in what you design.

     

Planning and Implementing Assessments [What did you discover about your students and your teaching with your actual learning assessment?]

I learned that my students are very smart.  All the students received 100% on their kid pix of the worm. I think it has something to do with the fact I had a word wall, definitions of each word, and a blank diagram.  I don’t believe in tricking or having my students memorize things.  By having them create their own worm and get this assistance does not make them have to memorize and it still tells me if they understand where parts are on a worm.  I also discovered that some students do not follow directions.  I repeated a couple of times that on the worksheet the students must write why something is a myth.  I did this because I wanted to see if the students really understood the information or if they were just guessing.  About 3 students did not write why something was a myth.  This shows that I need to teach and remind my students to follow the directions and look more at their papers when people are turning it in so I can see if they did what I wanted.  This will impact my future teaching because I will need to constantly remind my students to follow directions because if not this may turn into something bad.  Students need to know how to follow directions because they are apart of our everyday life. 

2.  What did you learn from observing your classmates lessons about:

 Assessing Prior Knowledge:

I learned that other student’s lessons either had no assessing or prior knowledge and some just did a simple discussion on it. My group did a brief discussion and got all our students involved in assessing prior knowledge because we would have students raise their hand to vote if they thought something was fact or myth.  I learned that it is super important and we must do this.  In one lesson they assessed nothing and I knew nothing about the material and right away I had to do centers and activities on it. It made me feel unprepared and nervous.  I did not like it.  We need to know what our students know or else our lessons and activities may not be Developmental Appropriate for our students.  None of my ideas had changed since I already knew the importance of this. This will impact my future teaching because I need to know at all times what my students know.  How can I plan a lesson on something if they may not have any prior knowledge or skills needed for the lesson?  Also activating prior knowledge is good because your brain will connect new information with old which will make it easier to remember.

Planning & Designing Instruction:

I learned that many people use centers.  Centers are amazing and can be a great thing to have in the classroom but that should not be our main instruction.  Students cannot learn if they have no base on a subject area.  This is why in my lesson we actually did a lesson and taught students information instead of letting them free to learn everything on their own.  I want my students to learn things on their own but we can not just rely on centers for everything.  Students may get information confused and it will be hard to break something after they already learned it.  My ideas on this has changed a bit because it has shown me how you need hands on and not worksheets because that is not how students learn.  They learn by “doing.”  My ideas have also changed because I have learned not to rely on activities to teach everything.  I must work with my students to teach them the base for them to learn the concept.  This will impact my future teaching because I know when I teach I must have a combination of direct instruction with centers/hands on activities.  My teaching styles cannot be all or nothing.  It can’t be all direct instruction or none, just like it cannot be all centers or none. I need to have a mix of both.

 Assessing Learning:

While observing others assessing of lessons is that we must assess what we taught.  If you never taught how to do something do not assess it.  Our assessment must match our objective or it does not have validity.  I also learned from other’s lessons we must assess individually.  One group did a group assessment.  The problem with that is that you do not know who did what and if one student did everything and another student did nothing.  If you do everything individually you are able of seeing exactly what that student knows not what their friend knows.  This idea has not changed for me.  I have always known the importance of individual assessments.  It bothers me when I do a group project and I landed up doing everything and people still got my grade.  That is not a good representation of what each student actually knows.  This will impact my future teaching because assessment is all around us.  We must assess what they have learned.  If they have not mastered the material I will have to think of an alternative way to teaching it.  If I do a lesson on writing an essay but their assessment is to write a sentence that is not good validity.  It does not show what my student’s may actually know.  This will also impact my teaching because I need to see each of my students as an individual and know what they know.  I should not do everything as a group because you really do not know if that student had master the concept or if their group did but not them.

Assess the individual so you know exactly what each student knows and what they don’t.