Video & Reflection

Video of Teaching Segment

Lesson Plans

Surrounding Lessons in the Unit

Assessment

Reflection

Immediately, after watching the footage back, I cannot help but be disappointed by the apparent lack of engagement with the materials. This was a struggle beyond the day that was recorded. Long periods of wait-time were evident. I did my best in this lesson to purposefully engage each student in the content, assigning tables to each Discussion Norm, designating a disussion leader in each group, and designing the discussion so that each student had to state their position on colonialism.

When students began discussing their initial stances on colonialism, some students became much more engaged than others. I ended up checking in with a few groups to initiate their discussion. The other section was more engaged in the discussion norm portion of the lesson while the recorded section was more engaged in the colonialization portion of the lesson. There was adequate participation from all students in each section, but excitement and engagement lacked. This could be due to a lack of interest in the content in general or simply apathy towards participating in class activities. One thing I could change is to begin the discussion by generally introducing colonization and having students determine how the injustice of colonization relates to their lives. This may have increased engagement. I also could have gone a bit deeper into what other students knew about colonization to provide more of a basis for their discussion.

I attempted to diversify the modalities of learning in this lesson--involving students in developing expectations, direct instruction, writing, small group discussion, reading, and writing. I wonder if there is too much mode-switching and that students could not smoothly transition from one mode to the next. Transitions are usually very slow with these students--writing a 1 sentence definition took 2 minutes. Sometimes I wonder if the amount of note-taking actually serves the students' knowledge building or if it is just busy work.

When it came to interacting with students, I tried to jump-start their conversations and push students to go a little deeper with their thinking by pressing for their reasoning and positing the alternative perspective. After watching the footage, I could have encouraged more students to share their interpretations of colonization when I first brought it up so that they would have more context before having to discuss their stance on the concept. Nevertheless, my interaction was positive and encouraging which continues to help foster good relationships.

There isn't really much diversified instruction according to each student present in this video, but the nature of discussion, especially one that is informal is that students are able to share their thoughts no matter where they may be at in their knowledge of the subject. One thing I could have done is provide additional supports and structure for the discussion to ensure that each student was sharing their position and backing it up with reasoning.