One of the biggest takeaways of this week for me is being flexible. This week I used the student’s interests on Pokemon books as the lesson hook to introduce graphs and charts. Last week I observed two students playing a game with their Pokemon book. Each student picked three main types of Pokemon and did a frequency count on their chosen types to see whose Pokemon show up more often in the book.

Halfway through the lesson, I realize that most of the students did not understand my instruction on one of the activities. I explained to the students that if more than half of you didn’t understand the question, then I did a bad job at explaining so please let me try again. I tried explaining again, but quickly enough I realized that it was not just my explanation wasn’t clear; the students did not understand the concept behind it either. Needless to say, I had to drop my lesson plan halfway and go back to the basics.

It was unfortunate that I wasn’t able to be in the classroom for long enough to know the students’ levels and the materials covered before. The teacher and I also had some miscommunications about the materials that were covered before, which resulted in the gap between my expectations and the students’ current level of understandings on graphs and charts.

After the Math class, I talked to my school teacher and asked for her suggestions. Despite the fact that the class did not go the way as I planned, she was still glad to see me trying new things and taking initiatives. We both agreed that now I would have a much better understanding of the students’ current mathematical levels. One suggestion that really resonated with me was to break down the lesson into smaller steps to set up the students for success. Sometimes I assume that the students would see the connections between different ideas, but in fact, it differs for everyone. Also, making my expectations clear to the students at the beginning of the class, so the students can have a better understanding of what they need to learn would really help.