Edited Blog Post (Holly Article Inspiration)

This week, my partner and I got to teach our lesson study.  We taught the second lesson, with the revisions that we made from the first one.  Overall, I thought the lesson was successful, although we were able to get great input from our observers.  For the next lesson, we plan to focus on the puzzle piece strategy and the importance of redirecting students' responses to the text.  We want to make sure that students' responses relate to the actual story that they are reading.  In this way they will notice that what they share has to be associated to the story in order to help them make inferences.  We also ran out of independent time.  We decided to use one story for the We do part of our lesson, which will cut down on reading time as well as picking up and passing out papers.  I am looking forward to seeing how the third lesson turns out.  I am also glad that we have had the opportunity to do this lesson study.  At the beginning of the lesson study, I was not convinced that we would learn much from the experience, especially teaching in classrooms that were not our own. However, the teachers have been exceptionally accommodating and tremendously helpful in the process. Furthermore, through the lesson study process we have been able to mimic what actual grade level team meetings may be like.  Just about all grade levels have a team that meets and discusses lessons together.  Being able to meet with my fifth grade team was an insight into what this might look like in the future.  It was also helpful to work with three people who all have different ideas and beliefs.  This is reflective of what my future grade level team may look like and therefore being able to accept each others’ ideas and roll with them even though those may not be our own ideas was great practice.  I am also excited to have a lesson that I could certainly use in my future classroom.

My partner and I also taught a reading lesson this week to the fifth graders while the fourth graders were taking the Florida Writes.  Students read a play and we assigned them roles that they read.  We were in a conference room (teacher's lounge) and also used some of the props that were around to go with the story.  The students had a blast reading the story and I was extremely proud of them.  I was also happy that we were able to keep the class under control.  We knew that we would be taking the fifth graders out to teach them the story, however the location was last minute.  We did not have a lot of time to prepare and we were still able to keep the kids on task and as quiet as possible to keep from distracting the classes that were testing next door.  Classroom management is something that I wanted more practice with this semester and this was an opportunity to practice that.  Before we did the lesson, I shared with the students that there were classrooms testing all around our room and that we needed to be respectful and stay as quiet as possible.  I also informed students that if we had to talk to them more than three times and ask them to settle down or get quiet, we would change behavior cards once we got back to the classroom.  I believe that this warning at the beginning of the lesson helped in keeping them quiet, however, there were a few students who I had to get serious with and ask to be quiet.  I even had to change one girl’s seat because she was getting easily distracted by her classmates and did not do her work.  If I was to do this again, I would probably have a sheet and add students’ names on it as I warn and talk to them, placing tally marks next to their names each consequent time.  In this way I would have known which students had to be talked to multiple times and I could go through with my rules and actually change cards for students who were not following the rules.