Catie Watson - Lesson Reflection #1

Lesson Plan Reflection 10-30-12

• What students learned and which students struggled with the lesson.
• Many of my students struggled with cause-and-effect relationships. They often identified the “cause” as being the “effect” and vice versa. Once I asked them which event was causing the other, they were able to correctly identify the cause and effect.
• After the lesson, I realized that the worksheet that I had students fill out as we read through the story was not a good measure of whether or not my students understood the concepts. We worked as a class to identify the cause-and-effect relationships. I called on several students to identify the relationships and then we wrote them down on the worksheet together.
• Although I could not use this worksheet as an assessment, I do think that I kept my students’ attention since they were required to be following along. I was not able to use the worksheet to assess which individual students struggled with the lesson.
• During guided reading group, I was able to identify three students that were having a particularly difficult time with cause-and-effect relationships.
• What are alternate reads of your students’ performance or products?
• Like I mentioned before, the worksheet that I had my students fill out as we read was not a good assessment tool since we completed it as a class.
• What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?
• While the five student volunteers were reading their paragraphs, I realized that the passage that we were reading was somewhat difficult for many of my students. Their fluency suffered due to unfamiliar words and complex sentences. Although many of my students have shown great fluency skills while reading narratives, I believe this type of text (informative) was more challenging for my students to read with good fluency.
• When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?
• I will spend more time tomorrow going over the fact that cause AND effect are BOTH events, however one CAUSES the other. I believe the fact that Reading Street “tells” me to teach the students to ask “What happened” to identify effect and “Why did it happen” to identify cause, created a lot of confusion for my students. Clarifying the idea that both are events, and stressing the fact that one causes the other may help clear up this confusion.
• I will also spend more time working with students who are struggling during guided reading groups. Directing questions at these students and helping to reinforce the concepts will hopefully help them grasp this material.
• 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?
• If I were to teach this lesson again, I would not use the questions “What happened?” and “Why did it happen?” that Reading Street suggested that I use. I believe this was the main reason why so many of my students were confused about cause-and-effect. Asking “What happened?” is confusing because there are multiple events happening. Identifying which event caused the other is the key to this comprehension skill. I would have also provided more concrete examples of cause-and-effect relationships if I were to re-teach this lesson.
• What did you learn so far about implementing your ‘core practice’ and what do you need to do to continue your professional learning?
• I have learned how important it is to plan and anticipate how my students will perceive the material I teach. I had expected my instruction about cause-and-effect to be enough teaching for my students to fully understand this concept. I had not anticipated the confusion and how the students might mix up the two. Planning and anticipating is crucial in order to be prepared for whatever challenges my students might face.