Kayla Wright
November 15, 2015
Video Reflection
For this assignment my cooperating teacher filmed me teacher a lesson about counting on, a strategy used for addition and subtraction. After some discussion we found several strengths and weaknesses in the lesson and some changes that could be made in the future.
In order to maintain a positive learning environment I used the attention getters when I felt that students’ minds were off somewhere else. “Holy moly guacamole” is something I used during this lesson in order to bring students back from a transition. It worked well students’ attention came back quickly. I also tried to give students directions before we moved at all. This is something that I tried after reflecting on another lesson with my cooperating teacher. It helped students to know what they were doing first and do it quickly instead of trying to move and listen to directions at the same time. This was an improvement from another lesson.
I struggled still with directions for the final task students had. My cooperating teacher and I agreed that it was just too many steps for first graders to comprehend all together. MY cooperating teacher and I discussed writing the steps on the board but decided that modeling what I wanted them to do a few times and having them repeat the steps would maybe work best. This is something I’ll try in the future.
When planning for instruction I wanted to mix it up for students a bit and not just have them doing independent work. This is why I chose to do the get on the bus activity. It had a few students up to act it out and others telling us how to count on. I felt that the activity went too fast though. We talked about maybe using it to count back also and then we could draw it out more. Because of this though I had to do an activity that wasn’t planned for the day. That was the spinners. Being flexible was one of the strengths of the lesson.
Students were engaged the most while we were on the carpet. When we went to do the bus activity I noticed one student had her head down in the video. I talked to my cooperating teacher about being more aware of all of the students and not just the ones that are closest to me. This is something that I really want to work on when giving direct instruction and using the board. I feel like it is much easier when I walk around and observe the kids during independent work. That will just come with practice and getting more comfortable.
Assessing students was a bit difficult at first because students didn’t understand what they were meant to do for the final task. After explaining again to each one individually who didn’t understand I was able to see more clearly who understood what counting on was and how to use it. Some students I could still see using their fingers instead of counting on. I then stopped them and helped them along. I made a mental note then of who still had a difficult time. After talking to my cooperating teacher, we decided that the following day I should discuss with students why you can’t use your fingers. I then used larger numbers for my examples to illustrate the importance of counting on.
I think this lesson was a good opportunity to really see where I needed to make improvements and how I needed to change my instruction from a style for older grades to a style suited for first grade. My cooperating teacher was great to collaborate with and gave great advice and even confirmed that I was on the right track with my own reflections.