This week I taught a variety of lessons in different subjects. I am currently teaching lessons on writing with the students. I’m finding it incredibly boring. If I’m bored how can I expect students to be engaged. I love writing but teaching grammar is mind numbing.

Okay, that’s a bit dramatic but I feel stuck. Maybe, it’s because the program I’m using isn’t exactly inspirational. I don’t know. I’m going to play around with topics and lesson structures and activities and see what I can do.

A highlight from this week was the art lesson I taught outside. I had the students create Andy Goldsworthy inspired sculptures. The students worked in groups and were so engaged and the pieces looked amazing. Overall, it was a great lesson. However, towards the end of the lesson we were doing a gallery walk of their sculptures and some of the students were goofing around and not paying attention. I started to loose my patience and used a sharp tone with the students. I was reflecting on this that night and realized that I wasn’t being my highest self. In our classroom we often ask the students to be their highest selves.

So, I thought how can I turn this into a learning opportunity. I decided to make a little restitution and model owning our mistakes. So in my next art lesson I said “Towards the end of our last lesson I wasn’t my highest self. I wanted to apologize and honour the hard work you guys put in.” The students were blown away and later that day someone even said  “Sorry Ms. Brown, I wasn’t being my highest self.”

It was a good third week overall.

 

 

 

Five or six hands shoot in the air whenever I ask a question with an expected answer. I usually give it a bit of time and soon there are more hands in the air. The students have the information I want, either from their own funds of knowledge or because I’ve given it to them.

When I ask questions that require thinking or an opinion, two or three hands shoot up. These people usually are just saying the first thing that pops into the air. The others are more perplexed. Sometimes I don’t know how long to wait and begin to give some answers myself or call on the automatic responders. Other times I ask the students to stand when they have a guess/answer/idea. Then I have them talk with a shoulder partner about their idea. Finally, I’ll take their answers. Of course the second option involves more learning and is the obviously better choice.

However, timing is an area I am working to improve. This means that for the sake of time I just fill in the blanks instead of allowing the students the they need to formulate their answers. Being aware of this allows me let go of “things” we are supposed to get to and let the students think. I often use follow up questions, rephrase, or change key words to help the students think about the topic in a deeper way. Basically, I’m learning how to give more time and support to get the students to extend their thinking about a topic – not just feeding them the answers to get through the material.

This topic also made me think about how student questions often move the class discussion deeper into a topic. I had a student ask “What’s wrong with regular sentences? Why don’t you want us to use them?” during a Language Arts lesson. I responded “There’s nothing wrong with regular sentences. We’re learning these sentence openers and dress-ups to make our writing interesting and engaging to read. We’re practicing these to build our writing muscles. By the end of this unit we’re all going to have huge writing muscles. These skills will help you all through high school and university.” I realized I didn’t explain why we were doing these activities. If the students didn’t even know the reasons behind the lessons why would they buy into it. I believe common goals are important to commitment to learning, otherwise it’s just busy work.

According to Wikipedia the Hawthrone effect is “a type of reactivity in which individuals modify or improve an aspect of their behaviour in response to their awareness of being observed.” Basically this is exactly what happened to me as I was observed.

My first observed lesson was another Language Arts lesson on theme. I was particularly proud of lesson. Previous to this observed lesson I had taught a lesson on plot. Some of the students really got plot and were ready to move onto to themes. Others had not finished their plot charts and another group had completed the plot charts back had key events in the wrong places. So I gave a lesson on theme and worked through the example of Finding Nemo with the class.

I had students orally create theme statements by pulling names from our list of topics.

Then I assigned the colour groups. The green group (the group who demonstrated clear understanding of plot) worked together to using the process demonstrated in the lesson to generate a list of 11 theme statements for Finding Nemo. The yellow group (the group who had trouble placing key events) worked on a plot chart for Finding Nemo together but had to come to consensus on the conflict, climax, and resolution. Then work on theme statements. The blue group (non-finishers) from a list of supplied events had to cut and paste a plot chart together.

Splitting the groups up and having them work on similar activities concerning plot and theme but differing difficulty worked really well in this class. Having all thirty students work on the same learning activity doesn’t always work well because students often become bored or frustrated.

When my FA came to observe I agonized about which examples to use in my Language Arts lesson. I thought seriously about including SEL examples. I knew SEL examples would impress my FA. I then thought about using climate change examples. I care a lot about environmental sustainability and will be tackling this with the students. I flipflopped back and forth for a while. Then in a moment of exhaustion I decided to select examples having to do with the Aquavan writing piece the students had written a few days before.

This wasn’t the best choice. Not everyone was paying equal attention during the Aquavan experience and some of them were confused about the information in the examples. Further more prepositions are confusing. The students were engaged and asking great questions during this lesson. They clearly wanted to understand. I would give myself a 7.5 out of 10 on this lesson.