Teaching and Reteaching

It has been a while since my last post! Wow does student teaching take a lot of time, but boy is it worth the time and effort! My class now has 28 students and we are all growing and learning more as each day passes. I love watching the growth and to see students respond to both challenges and successes that their academic and personal lives bring them - they really are 28 very unique individuals! :)

This post will focus on me reflecting on a lesson I have taught recently with an eye toward reteaching or extending the lesson to support learners more thoroughly.

The lesson that I am going to reflect on is a writing lesson I taught today about creating paragraph planner for a piece of narrative writing. The students were writing about the prompt "A Trip to Remember" which was entertaining for students to get to share their unique trips and vacations with their classmates. The learning goals for the lesson were for students to understand how to use the paragraph planning sheet and understand how to transfer their ideas from the planning sheet into an actual paragraph written out. Additionally, students were expected to learn about transition and time order words to help link their ideas together and for the narrative paragraph to have more fluency. In order to learn these ideas, I told the students my own narrative story and had them help me decide how to fill out the paragraph planning sheet. Additionally, we brainstormed a list of transition and time order words together for all of the students to use as a resource.

Students responded well to this lesson because we had worked many times before with creating a "main idea" or opening sentence in a paragraph as well as a closing sentence for the paragraph. I knew that students understood what should go in each place on the planning sheet because they could all justify their answers as to how their response worked in each location.

If I were to reteach the lesson again, I would make sure to have a print off sheet to pass out to students with time order and transition words so that students can have a wide variety of words to choose from to best suit their individual situations. Additionally, the list of words would allow students to gain a better idea of what transition and time order words are so that they can recognize those words in their reading to add meaning in that respect as well. Moreover, if I were to teach the lesson again I would like to do some more thinking and brainstorming on how to get students to not focus so much on the spelling of their words but on the meanings in their ideas. So many of my students get so bogged down by spelling, no matter how many times I assure them that spelling is not a concern for a starting draft, and then get increasingly frustrated when they are not given the correct spelling of a word when asked. I am not sure how I can stress or model that spelling can be fixed during the editing and conference stages of the writing process. Do I misspell a word to try and model these common mistakes? But do I want to run the risk that students don't recognize the word being misspelled and learn the incorrect spelling? Would more free writing exposure help cure this idea? So many questions, that probably can only be answered with time and experience that I will hopefully be able to conquer more as the year goes on.

To reteach this lesson for students that have already successfully met my expectations always seems to provide more of a challenge. For the prompt "A Trip to Remember" students who have already met expectations could extend the writing to two paragraphs, or more if applicable, in order to challenge themselves. The students could also be challenged to add certain vocabulary words or words that have challenging spelling patterns into their stories so that they are still being intellectually challenged throughout the activity while other students are finishing.

Though these may not always work, it is always important to try new ideas or techniques to figure out what really works for a group of kids, since all kids to not behave the same way or respond to the same set of directions. Furthermore, this differentiated instruction allows students to succeed and be challenged at a level that is intellectually appropriate for the student while still keeping the students motivated to learn more rather than using more materials to "fill time?"

Hopefully I will be able to brainstorm more ideas for what to do to not only support struggling learners as well as challenge students who have already completed the activity to the standard that was set. This seems to be a constant struggle in general education classes but I want to make sure that the students who are already meeting or exceeding standards in my classroom do not feel left out or constantly bored with the activity, creating a negative association with a subject and the negative feeling I have now.