This marked the first week that I taught lessons in my Grade 4 classroom. My wonderful TA (and I can’t say enough good things about him… and I’m not just saying that because he may read this) traditionally does a newspaper unit with his class. With my background, it seemed like a perfect fit. I dabbled with newspapers in the classroom a bit during my ED2500 so three cheers for saving materials and bookmarking Internet sources! I don’t know how to plan a unit (yet) but I approached this as a series of lessons leading up to a performance task.
I rocked my first lesson, which was a newspaper scavenger hunt to get students familiar with the types of organizational structure of this type of print text, and how text features such as headlines and page flags can enhance the understanding of ideas and information.
In the next three lessons, we revisited the organizational structure of print text, and discussed how the 5W’s and 1H play a role in our daily writing — as a reporter writing a journal entry or telling a story to a friend. Students used the 5W’s and 1H to communicate information to their peers through the interview process in the final lesson.
The first three lessons were bang-on. The students were engaged and I was happy with the way the classroom clicked along. My fourth lesson on Friday didn’t see the same level of success. I flipped through all four lesson plans and noticed a few differences in Lesson 4.
Differentiation: I didn’t prepare for differentiation in my final lesson. As a result, I’m heading into my classroom with students at three different spots in the lesson. I crammed three rather large activities into an hour-long lesson. I overplanned with the intent of having the final activity in the bank for Monday’s class. Trouble is, I didn’t keep that third one in the bank. Some of the students ploughed through the first two activities so I cashed in Activity 3 and got them working on it. Where does that leave me? I’m walking in Monday morning to some students who have finished writing their newspaper story and others who have yet to start Activity 1. Great teachers don’t leave students behind. I’ve left a few behind and allowed others to work ahead. Lesson learned.
If I set defined times for activities and stuck to them, it may have helped me bring students along so everyone’s at the same point. Time limits may have served as incentives for some students. The students I thought may have difficulties with this assignment, didn’t because they were excited about their writing topic and other students volunteered to help them with spelling. When there’s no deadline, it’s easy to sit in front of a blank page for 60 minutes.
I talked to my TA after and he suggested on Monday having the stronger students help the weaker writers because “no reporter is left behind.” (See, I told you he’s good.)
Too many tasks, too much instruction: Yes, you can have too much instruction. (My TA introduced a math lesson about patterns without saying a word but I’ll save that for another blog post.) I “overcooked” this lesson. I spent a great deal of time at the beginning explaining the activity and talking about my writing prompts. I don’t think the writing prompts were necessary for most students as they seemed to have an idea what they were going to write about. Then again, a formative check at this point would have left more time for the activity.
Instead of giving ALL of the instructions at the beginning, I should have “chunked” the lesson and instructed – activity – assess x3 instead of instruct – instruct – instruct – activity – activity – activity and assessing on an individual basis. (Work smarter, not harder.) If I incorporated defined times for activities during my planning, my lesson would have looked a lot different.
Teacher autopilot: This is a term I learned over the weekend and I like it. I was very, very excited about the lesson. Enthusiasm in contagious and in this case it reached epidemic proportions. My students were like runaway horses. At one point, I looked up and had this gut feeling that I should just shut the class down, just make everyone return to their seats and put their heads down on their desks so I could calm down and feel like I had control of the situation. Then, I figured, “Hey, they’re writing. They’re sharing information. They’re having a good time. Learning is fun.” And I put my head down and went back to encouraging my two reluctant writers. Bad move. I finished that class feeling exhausted and defeated. They led the class, not me. It’s not a good feeling as a teacher and not one I look forward to experiencing again.
My TA and I deconstruct every lesson, usually later in the day after I’ve had a few moments to jot down a few reflections. He suggested on Friday that I create defined times for activities, and to stop for comprehension and check classroom behaviour early as I did in Lessons 1-3. He also suggested when it comes to lessons that I “keep it simple.” I created three simple lessons and one complex one last week. The three simple ones worked. The complex one didn’t. The complex one could have been designed as a simple lesson if I put more planning into the execution.
And that's the great thing about PSI. It's OK to make mistakes in a controlled environment as long as I learn from them. Is it embarrassing to flub up while not only my TA but university supervisor is watching? Yes. It's borderline horrifying. However, I'd much rather make mistakes with someone on the outside looking in and then making suggestions for improvement, than falling alone and having no one around to help pick me up.