Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Observation 2
problem and the proper solution and planned to utilize the document
camera for the first time to project it.
Overall, my lesson went well. Group work went relatively
smoothly, the students stayed engaged, and seemed to work through
some questions. Still, there were some difficulties. When I had a group
come up to share their process, I noticed that theyd come up with an
incorrect answer. I am not 100% comfortable with the skill itself, and
thought theyd calculated incorrectly, when, in fact, theyd confused
their process. My CT stepped in to clarify this, thankfully.
Another challenge was pacing. I was hesitant to cut the group
work short because the students were all very engaged, but still
werent finished. They took much longer than Id expected. Because of
this, I went way over my 40 minutes. I need to become comfortable
with re-engaging students even if they havent finished their
exploration yet. Direct teaching may be the key to enabling them to do
their work independently.
The biggest problem occurred because of my impromptu decision
to re-teach their homework problem. We went through the steps, but
the students were not getting it. It wasnt until after the lesson that I
was able to step back and realize, with Debbies help, that the problem
was worded badly. I learned a huge lesson: before assuming that all
your students have done something incorrectly, check yourself: is the
problem bad? Did you set them up for success? Did you give clear
expectations?
After the lesson, I met with a few students over lunch who selfidentified as struggling with the skill. My teacher recommended using
the reteaching resources that come with my schools math
curriculum. They were so helpful! They clearly broke down every step,
using extra practice problems to isolate gaps in content knowledge. In
the future, if Im teaching a skill that I dont feel very comfortable with,
Ill probably skip to using the reteaching resources to make sure that I
understand it inside and out.