Adjustments to Practice

By the end of my practicum, I became quite good at in-the-moment adjustments to my lesson plans based on student reception. For example, simple changes like time limit increases and short bursts of group work to reinforce collaborative skills are easy to do and can make a lesson more engaging for students. Adjustments don't have to happen on the fly, though. Because I teach quarter-based classes, I had opportunities to see lessons be taught that I would later teach myself or even have the ability to teach a lesson a second time (to a different group of students). I don't teach the same lesson to multiple classes within a day, unlike many core-subject teachers, so I have one shot to get it right before the next quarter, but having these few opportunities where I was able to see or practice a lesson more than once gave me a lot of insight into how they could be modified for the better.

Group work, for me, has shown great success in getting students to work on assignments that they may not want to or would struggle with otherwise. by simply having the option to work with peers to solve problems, answer questions, or complete a project, students tend to feel more comfortable with taking risks and, from my observations, end up learning from each other more rather than raising their hand constantly. I like to use it, especially, when there is a large amount of reading to be done that I can split up across the class and then have students share out what their section said.

Below is a lesson plan for an 8th grade Computer Technology 8 class where students worked with their groups to read sections of an article about computers; what they are and how they work. They were tasked with taking notes on their section and designating someone to share to the rest of the class what they found important before they all answered a set of short questions based on the reading. This lightened the workload for every student and gave them the opportunity to work and talk with each other to accomplish a goal. Before I adjusted this lesson, students would have read through this article as a class which, from my observations, led to several students not paying attention to the reader and struggling more with the questions that followed. The choice to incorporate group work was a success, allowing the content to be more digestible and promote teamwork skills in the process.