On the negative side the lesson was a bit too short – more questions could have been added at the end to facilitate students who worked faster. More examples could have been added at the end. Not much emphasis was placed on differentiation, as the concept needed to be understood in its entirety.Each student had a worksheet to complete, each one had a specific task in the lesson and there was individual work required from all.
Monday, 11 February 2013
Sciences make microscopic things visible
The fun factor increased the learning in this lesson. All students were very engaged. The theme of making microscopic things visible made it more real and understandable for the students. Students were talking about the work during the activity, which also helped to slow down the lesson and gave students the opportunity to cement the concepts really well.
Maths looking for ways of introducing "algebra" to Gr.8
We have frozen what we planned to continue with from last year, i.e. a Pythagoras lesson to the Grade 9’s because it comes very late in the year according to our work schedule. We have opted to look at other ways of introducing algebra to our Grade 8. We have looked at different readings as well as different approaches about how to introduce a variable to a Grade 8 student. We have looked at how we may integrate other subjects into helping us to develop this concept. We have been doing this for 2 weeks. Hence we are planning to come up with a complete lesson plan from next week, based on what we have learnt.
Listening for “Learning talk” in Grades 2 and 3
The Marubitshi group discussed why and how we teach Maths in Grades 2 and 3 to reinforce our strategies for teaching our mathematics curriculum.
For 10 minutes - Whole class counting, estimating, working up and down the number ladder, rounding off, calendar dates, number names and place value
15 minutes per group - Students are then divided into ability groups to do problem solving. This enables us to observe the thinking of each child, listen to the “learning talk” and provide an opportunity for cognitive dissonance to develop. Children record their own thinking in “carpet books” and explain their thinking to the group.The other groups will be working through their copies of Arnold Brombacher's "Number Sense" and completing board work/work sheets to reinforce the daily concept. This will take place three days a week. Day four will be patterns / measurement / shape / data. On day five we will assess, consolidate or extend our class.
Our teaching style will be adapted to the needs of our students and developing “learning talk” to make maths stimulating and fun.
Reflections from micro-teaching "Reading" in the IP
4 February: The third, and final, session in this particular lesson study was largely reflection. We viewed some video clips with the intention of discussing each in detail but it took a different course. As teachers viewed the clips thoughts thoughts were shred of what had happened in their own 'reading-station lessons'. There were some common findings:
1. Instructions on task cards must be concise yet easy to understand.
2. Tasks must be timed realistically.
3. Some benefits of micro teaching in the teacher group were: One got through more; able to go into more detail; students are ‘forced’ to engage because the group is small; students were positive and engaged; an opportunity for students to guide learning; weaker students performed better without being over shadowed.
4. Benefits of other groups were: students were responsible; they cooperated and shared ideas; opportunity for self-management.
5. Teachers gained confidence. Using this experience they will be able to apply it to other lessons in Maths and Inquiry lessons.
6. Teachers who had planned assessments and later felt that it was not balanced and intend to put more thinking into it.
7. The teachers who took the opportunities to view other lessons and get involved in discussions and reflections, managed better because they put more thought into their planning.
Humanities / technology: concrete preparation and dissonance
04.02.13, Wk 3/3, was intended to be a group feedback session on the Gr 12 lesson. Unfortunately, no one was able to observe the lesson and a willing volunteer to film it wasn’t found. The teacher who had planned to teach the lesson was absent from today’s cell meeting. The rest of us talked around our general expectations of the cell this term/year and discussed what we would find most helpful to focus on. Instinctively, we agreed that anything that would help to improve student learning and, by association, teachers’ teaching would be welcome.
We also reviewed the notion that the process of moving from concrete preparation in our teaching to creating a dissonance for the students was a way of encouraging students to discuss and develop their thinking and understanding around a topic, enabling them to see an issue from more than one angle.By posing a problem and requiring students to engage with it in smaller groups misconceptions could be rectified by the group member together and solutions could be found, even if all members were unable to agree. We also touched on the purpose of questioning in our lessons: are they to reinforce student understanding, to find out what students are thinking or to create a social construct by which a small group interact and develop their thinking and understanding in the ‘safety’ of a smaller group? All will be applicable at different times.
Humanities / Technology cell - how to address widely differing needs of our students
Humanities/Technology Cell Wk 2/3 of the Teaching & Learning cycle: 28.01.13: We focused our attention on the preparation of a Gr.12 lesson on EGD. Each of us had a copy of the lesson plan in front of us as the teacher explained and clarified the intentions for the lesson in terms of student learning and the methods and resources that would be used to achieve this end. As time is short for covering all the required curriculum content, only one lesson is available in which to ensure that all students grasp this information.
We discussed the challenges for the teacher of having students in the same group with widely differing life experience – at one extreme there is a student who has traveled widely and who has two highly educated parents has a very good general knowledge; at the other, there is a student from a very contrasting background whose general knowledge is extremely limited. The givens in these lessons cannot be taken for granted and the necessity to explain basic ideas and facts can slow the lesson down considerably. We also touched on the pressure for us to deliver ‘best practice’ in all areas of teaching and learning when there were so many elements in each lesson to consider.
The teacher is who is planning to teach this lesson hopes there will be more interaction than normal between teacher and students as the electronic/interactive whiteboard will be used.
More feedback for Visual Arts intern
Today, we studied the final lesson plan presentation of the student intern, who is due to teach the Visual Art grade 9 lesson next week Monday, 11 February 2013. We have looked at the worksheet created for students to do as a homework assignment. The discussion ended with the student intern telling us about her experience in this process and stating that:
“It was wonderful for me to learn that there are so many ways to be creative in a lesson plan. I am fascinated by how many different things one can do to make the instruction of the lesson interesting.”We also shared how our viewpoints of teachers have significantly changed from when we were children to actually (mostly accidentally) becoming teachers and how we feel about the impact of teaching in a child’s life right now. After we have done the review of the taught lesson, we will aim to all come up with ideas how to spend the next rotation of our CPD 'Lesson Study' sessions, focusing on the needs of the teachers in our group.
Sunday, 10 February 2013
Languages analyse advertisements
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