Formal Observation Reflection

Name: ​Michaela O’Leary Date: ​04/02/2019

1. How effective were your instructional strategies? What changes would you make
in your instructional approaches if you taught this lesson again? Why?

I think my instructional strategies were decently effective. At the beginning of the

lesson, I was able to gather the class on the carpet and tell students explicitly
what I wanted from them. Once I split the class into groups, they were able to
complete the task without having many questions or seeming confused. I think
using jigsaw was effective because the students often work in groups and are
able to work well together with minimal problems. I think one change I could
make were ways I called the attention of the class. When I needed their attention
I would usually just speak loudly but I think it would be beneficial to use some
sort of clap or call and response instead of just raising my voice. If I taught this
lesson again and I was given more time, I think I would have liked to explain
each station out loud to the class so the directions could be even more clear and
students wouldn’t have had to waste time in their groups getting situated.

2. Compare how students actually responded to the lesson verses the way you
anticipated they would respond. Explain how you scaffolded or extended
students’ thinking.

Overall, I think students were more engaged in the lesson than I anticipated. I
wasn’t sure if students were going to be interested in reading about Cherokee
Indians or the Piedmont region but the students really got into the content and
worked hard to complete the task assigned to them. I think I did have to do more
scaffolding than anticipated. When choosing the articles I had at each station for
students to read, I thought most of them were around a 3rd grade level, or
something they could handle as a group. Unfortunately, some of the readings I
chose were too long and too high above the students’ reading levels. Luckily,
because all the students were working in small groups, I had the chance to go
around to each table and help them when necessary. This scaffolding looked like
shortening the amount students needed to read, reading the students’ articles out
loud to them, and helping them summarize what we just read. I believe time also
played a factor in this. I initially felt 15 minutes was sufficient for the students to
 complete the task I had for them but in the future I understand this is not enough
time.

3. Describe how you assessed whether your students achieved the objective of the
lesson. Was this effective? If not, what would you change about your
assessment?

To assess students I used two different types of formative assessments. First, I

had students present and share out to the class about what they learned at their
station. By listening to their main idea summaries and looking at their
illustrations, I was able to tell if students were grasping the content well enough
to meet the objective or not. The other formative assessment I used was an exit
ticket. I think the exit ticket was effective because it gave students an open
opportunity to share with us what they learned. I think something I could have
changed about the exit ticket was the wording of the prompt. I used the same
wording that is used in the NC state standards and I think students may have had
a bit of a difficult time understanding the prompt.

4. How effectively did you motivate your students, set and enforce expectations,
and handle transitions? Would you change anything and if so, why?

I think I did a great job setting expectations for students and giving them explicit
instructions. Because each student was assigned a job as a reader, timekeeper,
writer, or illustrator, this helped students stay on task and feel like they had real
contributions to make to the group. I also think that by allowing students to
choose who they worked with and what topic they would study, this kept students
interested and motivated them to do their best work. At the same time, I think this
would have gone better for 1 or 3 groups if I had chosen who they worked with
for them. I think that next time I would just need to include more time for
transitions as well as instructional time. Each part of the activity went well but
transitions and some part of instructional time was rushed or hectic so this took
away from students’ learning.

5. Did you make modifications to your lesson plan during the lesson? If so, what
were they and what motivated these changes?

During the lesson, I realized that some of the articles I picked out were too long
or too challenging for my students to read. To improve this situation, I modified
how much of the article some of the groups had to read and I went around and
read out some of the articles to students that were struggling. I also decided to
 give students longer than 15 minutes to complete the explore part of the lesson.
When we were 10 minutes in, I realized most groups had not finished reading the
articles yet and therefore hadn’t had a chance to fill out their notecard with a
summary so I decided to give them 5-7 extra minutes. If I had the ability during
the lesson to change some of the groups up as well as change up some of the
articles, I would. I would also have given students more time to complete the
task. Finally, I think I would have narrowed in the topic a little more because I
think when trying to cover so much, a lot of important information was lost. I think
many students also only ended up learning about what they read about in their
station but didn’t learn enough about the other students stations from their
presentations.

6. How did you meet your Teaching Behavior Focus? If you did not meet it, what
would help you to meet it next time?

My teacher behavior focus was promoting collaboration. I think this is one thing I
did really well through this lesson. I really like NC State’s emphasis on using the
launch → explore → discuss lesson template so I tried to base the activity off of
this idea. To do this I planned a jigsaw to allow students to become experts on a
topic and then bring it back to share out with the class. Through the jigsaw,
students were participating in cooperative learning. Students were in an
environment that enabled student collaboration; in fact, it wasn’t possible to
complete the task without group communication and collaboration. I was also
able to foster student engagement through discussion by creating a task that
asked students to summarize and illustrate something as a group that they just
read about. I also asked students to present, share and discuss there topic with
all classmates outside of their small group of peers that worked on the same
topic as them.