Portion of Student Paper

Stephen Krashen, in his theory of comprehensible input, holds that students need to be able to understand the messages they receive when they read text and listen to speech (1982). This is one area in which my lesson had its greatest weaknesses. Watching the lesson video, I realized how unclear my directions often were and how fast my speech was at times. Often, I simply stated the directions instead of giving my students multiple means of representation by also having the directions displayed on the board, numbered, with visual references. For my focal student, it was clear during the building background portion of the lesson that my directions were unclear because she was not certain if she was supposed to write down all of the mathematical key words or just words for multiplication. An easy way to informally assess my own clarity in directions would have been to ask a “reporter” to report back the directions to me, or to their partner, at different times throughout the lesson.

Another weakness in the area of comprehensible input was my use of sentence frames. Echevarria, Vogt, and Short (2017) recommend the use of sentence frames for both oral and written answers. I differentiated my assessment by providing some students, including my focal student, with sentence frames on the graphic organizer, while leaving off sentence frames for more advanced math students. For both my focal student as well as two others with this scaffold, it ended up being a hindrance rather than a help. All three students asked me if they had to use the frames or if they could simply write their own sentences. I realized that it limited them rather than giving them the support that they needed. It would have been more beneficial to provide them with a word bank of possible sentence stems to choose from rather than providing only one.