Back-to-Back Reflection

    Recently, I was tasked with developing and teaching two lessons to a group of peers over the course of two days. My lessons aligned with the Performance Criterion 3.2: Positive Social Interaction, which states, "Candidates design learning environments that support collaborative learning marked by positive social interaction". My lesson focused on teaching rates of change, more commonly referred to as slope in mathematics, and applied real world applications and utilized activities focused on group collaboration to reach our learning targets. My lesson meets PC 3.2 because of the formative assessment used on the second day, which involved the students to work together to solve and model a problem which would have been challenging to work on individually. Students shared their ideas, corrected each other, and worked together to complete the task. While I feel that I met PC 3.2, I could have gone further by including more questions in the activity, or creating more opportunities for think-pair-shares and turn and talks.

     My experience teaching these lessons was a very informative one, and I learned a lot about adjusting my practice using student feedback. After the first lesson, in which I had a moment where students wrote on the board their ideas of examples of rates of change, my students informed me that they would have liked more opportunities to spend time at the board, and so I adjusted my formative assessment for the second day to be entirely at the board, as opposed to sitting in groups. Something I had also done during my first lesson was use student examples as discussion topics that we explored in the context of slope, and I learned that students become more engaged when they can play a role in providing specific examples, so I chose not to

have pre-written examples for the second lesson, and instead opted for student led examples again. Also, I realized that I have to write much larger than I think I do when writing on the board! It's very easy to think the writing is large enough when you're a few inches away, but students may have trouble seeing it. I also adjusted my second lesson to include a slide of the agenda and learning targets, which I also read aloud, as I only had written it on the board for the first lesson.
    My formative assessments, in the form of exit cards and the group activity, allowed me to assess my students' understanding of slope, how it applies to real world models, and how to interpret a graph. I also provide opportunities for students to vocalize their questions or concerns, as well as giving them an opportunity to write their questions to me if a student was uncomfortable speaking up in class. During this experience, I realized how difficult it is to gauge how long an activity will take students, so I learned that it is beneficial to have optional activities planned which could also benefit student learning, but we do not necessarily need to do in order reach our learning target for the day.
    I learned a lot about myself as a teacher during this experience. Something my peers and I noticed was that I tend to address students as "guys", which I realize is noninclusive for some students, and so I would like to start addressing students as "folks", "scholars", "mathematicians", or other gender inclusive words. I felt incredibly comfortable in front of the class even though I tend to be a quiet student, and my peers noticed my confidence and how comfortable I was, which only made me more confident in my abilities as a teacher. My experiences in my Literacy and Curriculum courses were very influential in the development of these lessons, as I was considering how to teach students new vocabulary, including y-intercept, slope, rate of change, increasing and decreasing, and other mathematical terms, while also differentiating instruction so that I can effectively reach all of my students. I am excited to teach lessons to larger groups of students and to see how effective of a teacher I am for students!