Teaching Episode: Mini Lessons

This week in our education classes we had the opportunity to prepare and teach back-to-back mini lessons to our classmates. We chose a topic within our unit, drafted lesson plans, edited and revised them many times, gathered materials, set up technology to use to present the material, created assessments, and more. After giving our first mini lesson on Tuesday we went back through and revised our lesson plan for Thursday based on how much we were able to cover in the first lesson. This teaching episode was very unique not only because we had to figure out how to teach, engage, and assess in just 20 minutes, but also because we taught these lessons to our classmates in our education classes.
In my group there was one other mathematics major and three English majors. This was an incredible opportunity to teach to learners at a variety of levels, as there were some students who were rather lost in the math content (after not doing this type of math since middle school), and others who thought it was far too easy for them (the other math major). After each lesson, we exchanged feedback with one another. This was perhaps the part where the most learning happened. Not only did we learn about ourselves as teachers and about how to time a short lesson, but we learned from others about how we performed from the students' perspective. The feedback included things like our classroom presence and teacher language, clarity in how we spoke and presented the material, getting students interested and engaged in the content, organization, and more. This was incredibly helpful when editing our lesson plans between Tuesday and Thursday classes and figuring out the areas which we should focus on improving.
On Tuesday I did not have enough time to introduce slope triangles, so I had to edit my lesson plan so that I could have enough time to do this on Thursday, and sift out what was necessary for Thursday and what material would have to come in the following lesson. I recognized that I tried to fit far too much content into these two mini lessons than what was possible within this time frame, while still doing the activities I had set up. I edited the learning outcomes from the lessons, what pieces of standards the lessons pertained to, the timing for each of the parts of the lesson, the assessment for after the second class, and the accommodations for students. I had never had to edit lesson plans based on the timing of back-to-back lessons. I hadn't before thought about how if students have an important question related to the content that needs to be addressed, then that could throw off the timing of the lesson that I originally intended.
Attached here is a folder of my materials for these mini-lessons, of which includes my first and second draft lesson plans, a screenshot of the NearPod presentation slides, a detailed outline, some examples of vocabulary discussed in the first lesson, assessments from each of the lessons (exit task folders), feedback from my classmates and professors, and a few images from the activities.
In my lesson, I used NearPod to present material. The first lesson started with having students draw any picture using only straight lines, then setting this aside. We reviewed what we previously knew about graphing points on an xy-plane, then jumped into the relationship between two points. I wanted for students to spend some significant time on the language associated with this lesson, especially because there were three English majors in the room. We discussed how we have heard the word slope before in other contexts, and then talked about the words "rise" and "run" and the directions we associate with those words. The idea of this is to help students remember the vocabulary to better understand what slope is. After defining slope, we looked at types of slope, and I gave students examples of these through hiking. After this we dove into an activity where we used m&m's and graph paper to see that there is not just one specific line within one type of slope, but instead that there are an infinite amount of lines that classify as each type of slope. This activity also served as an introduction to proportional relationships, and students observed one defining quality: that these lines that are all proportional relationships all go through the origin. After this we were almost out of time, mostly because I hadn't factored in time for the questions that students had, so we moved on to the exit task. Students were asked to define slope, draw a picture of each type of slope and label it, and to write down one question they have.
I think this first lesson went very well for the most part! I could have been more clear with the directions for the activity, but I quickly caught onto it when my students seemed confused. Though I do wish we could have had time for the last few things I wanted to do in this first mini lesson, I am really pleased with the clarifying questions that students asked. They seemed to respond well to hearing something explained a different way in order to understand something if they didn't get it the first way I explained it. The feedback I received indicated that students liked my explanations, the activity, the pacing, and my classroom presence. My professor indicated she liked the clarity of my instruction, strong sense of my audience, use of NearPod features and ability to connect with students' knowledge and experiences. Some areas to focus on for the second lesson were to provide more clarity with directions for the activity, ore clarity on what students are learning, and that with a real group of students I may need to slow down and check for understanding more often. Another piece of student feedback is to come back to the pictures we drew, as it was clear we ran out of time and students may not have known why we drew those pictures at the start of class if we didn't do anything with them. This helped me to recognize that this activity could be a great way to start off the next class by reviewing types of slope. This feedback helped me to recognize what I should and should not focus on for Thursday's lesson.
The second lesson was on Thursday, and we began by going over the exit task from the last class to review what we already knew so we could jump right into the content for the day. One student was absent last class, so I created a note sheet for her of notes from last class, so she was able to follow along. This note sheet could serve as a good tool for differentiation for students who need help with organization or students who need assistance in note taking. To review from last class, students took the pictures they all drew and labelled each line its the type of slope. Then, we discussed proportional relationships by looking back at the m&m's activity, and then talked about what a constant of proportionality is and why it is important. Afterwards we reviewed that slope was the ratio of vertical change to horizontal change (or rise over run) and went into the hallway for an activity. I had x and y axes taped onto the floor, and using the floor tiles as one unit each, we did a graphing activity to help students visualize graphing slope and proportional relationships better. There were two pairs of partners, and each round one student would stand on the origin and the other would stand on where they think a second point on the graph would be. After agreeing on where the second partner would stand, students would look over to the other graph to compare. We did a few rounds of this, where I would either give them a slope or an equation for a proportional relationship (in the form y=mx). After this activity, we discussed why we did this activity and what students got out of it. Finally, students took an exit task to wrap it all up.
This second lesson I don't think I did well with timing. I ran out of time at the very end and students didn't have long to complete the exit task. In the feedback I received, students and my professor agreed that I should have left more time for the assessment at the end of class. My assessment was much longer than it should have been, especially given that I only left 2 minutes for it. The feedback I received for this lesson included issues of timing at the end, and that I should have focused some more time on defining the language associated with proportional relationships the way I did for slope, rise, and run. Another piece of advice I received was to not pack as much content into one lesson, which is something I found myself struggling with throughout planning these mini lessons.
The assessments I had students complete showed that they retained a significant amount of information. I saw there was some confusion about zero slope and undefined slope. I also noticed that some students had a hard time looking at a line and figuring out what the slope is numerically. This lesson focused more on positive and negative slopes and the skill of graphing using a given slope. From viewing the results of the final assessment, I saw that each student seemed to understand that a proportional relationship is one that goes through the origin, which answered a part of a common core standard I was hoping to address. (CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.7.RP.A.2.A). The other standard I was hoping to address was to have students identify slope (or unit rates) using graphs and equations, (CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.7.RP.A.2.B). I think students were able to do this well during some of the activities, but besides that students did a much better job being given a slope and then graphing it or writing an equation, rather than the other way around, as this standard is looking for. I believe that a lesson following these mini lessons would have to move forward in helping students to learn this skill so they can effectively meet the standard completely.
Through this lesson I worked on performance criteria 3.1 Active Engagement, 4.2 Making Discipline Accessible and Meaningful, and 7.2 Knowledge of Learners by the activities I planned for each mini lesson. I recognize that there are different types of learners and multiple intelligence's, so I try to do all I can to keep all students engaged in the content. Looking at our accommodations matrix alone, (link in my lesson plan drafts), you can see that many students have attention span and distraction issues, as well as some students who have language barriers. The lesson I planned used activities to help those students, as well as get all students to be able to better visualize concepts and to help students who need more hands-on learning to keep them engaged. I showed performance criteria 9.1 by the practice of creating and revising lesson plans, receiving feedback and adjusting instruction based on that, and most of all learning about what I'm like as a teacher and how I can improve and grow further.

Curriculum & Literacy Video Asignments

        The first assignment for Literacy and Curriculum in Middle & High School Classrooms has to do with our understandings of the words "literacy" and "curriculum". For literacy, we all made videos using the app Shadow Puppet to explore what literacy is and how we interpret it in our content areas. For curriculum, we explored some curriculum orientations in class and created a video on the app Explain Everything describing what orientations we identify with as future teachers. 

          These two projects were helpful in exploring how we want to develop as future educators and what our goals will be for in the classroom. We had the opportunity to examine different teaching styles through the curriculum orientation then talk about how we can apply them to help produce students who are literate in our content areas. One overlap I see when creating these videos is a strong focus on how teaching must be student-centered. In the orientations I discussed, Humanism and Progressivism, the common idea was that students should be encouraged to explore their academic interests. Progressivism had a strong focus on exploring through experimentation, whereas humanism had an emphasis on individual freedom and choice in their studies. The two orientations are both student focused to help shape the next generations into intellectual citizens, rather than teachers being  more concerned with the school's performance ranks. This is why when I discussed mathematical literacy, I put a strong emphasis on problem solving. Problem solving teaches you how to think and is a transferable skill you will need in any given setting, and will help shape the next generations into strong thinkers.

         The two videos meet several performance criteria, the most important I see being 4.2, to make the discipline accessible and meaningful and 3.2 designs approaches that engage. This is shown not only through the curriculum approaches focusing on the students' questions and interests, but also by the example given at the end of the curriculum video. A former teacher of mine used to have each student pick a topic they are interested in and research how it has to do with math, then present it to the class. This is one thing that I am most excited to implement in my future classroom because it is an absolutely great way to get students engaged in math and to show them how applicable it is to the world around them. This project made math more meaningful for many of my classmates when they did this project, and that is why I want to implement this into my future classroom.Some other performance criteria these videos meet are 5.1 and 5.2, a perspective from varied disciplines and cross-disciplinary skills, as Mike and I explored how math literacy and physics literacy overlap through applications of the content.

          Through these two video projects I had the opportunity to learn two apps I hadn't experimented with much. Not only did I use the app to create a project from a student's perspective, but our classes also discussed the advantages and disadvantages of using these technologies in our future classrooms. In addition, I expanded my definition of literacy. At first I thought literacy was strictly involving reading and writing, but I really enjoyed researching all the things that math literacy can be: from numeracy, to spacial understanding, to problem solving. Learning about math literacy helped me to realize the big picture as to why it is so important for students to be able to understand and analyze math. 

Literacy of Mathematics and Physics:

My Curriculum Orientation:

ELL Tutoring Partnership Case Study

Through my partnership tutoring at a local high school, I've learned an abundance on how students develop and grow in a variety of ways, which has allowed me to understand how to design learning experiences which are both developmentally appropriate and challenging. In meeting with my student all semester I've observed where he stands cognitively, linguistically, socially, and emotionally, which has helped me to better connect with him academically and personally. Through having both academic and social conversations with him and having him read aloud to me, I was able to observe his linguistic skills. By understanding his linguistic development, I was able to adjust how I spoke to him in order to assure he will understand me, yet continue to challenge him to learn new words. From observing his interactions with peers and his interactions with myself and my placement partner, I was able to see where he stands in social development. Through helping support him in a time when he experienced such a hardship, I was able to reflect upon his emotional development. I am incredibly proud of how he dealt with the loss of his friend in such a mature manner, how he felt comfortable opening up to myself and my placement partner about his feelings, and how he prioritized academics even while dealing with such a hardship. My student has blown me away this semester and it has been a pleasure watching him grow.

Case Study

My second major: Mathematics

Same subject + different students = different lesson

Today W was starting to learn about exponents, something I was thrilled to hear about! My favorite lesson I’ve taught was last May while subbing in a middle school, and I taught a class of 8th graders exponent rules. There was originally another teacher in the classroom and she told me to stay put and not worry about teaching the students, but then when the kids continued to ask why certain rules existed, she time after time said “that’s just the way it is.” After hearing that a few times I politely asked her if I could say a few words on the exponent rules. I then used the division rules of same base exponents to explain why anything raised to the power of zero is one. The students seemed very engaged and excited to hear somebody explain to them the “why” behind this. After that the teacher asked how I was able to come up with that proof on the spot, and after telling her I’m a double major in mathematics and secondary education, she asked if I was comfortable teaching the rest this lesson without her because she had other work she wanted to go do. The rest of the day I had the best experience working with these exponent rules in a middle level classroom, so I was overjoyed when I heard W was working on exponents.

I was excited to see how teaching W would differ from teaching the same lesson to 8th grade students. It was very interesting to show him new notation of how to express exponents and radicals. He really seemed to grasp that you multiply the base number by itself however many times based on what the exponent is. He had a tough time differentiating between something like 23 and the cubed root of 8 . These are both representing that 23 is 2*2*2, or 8, and that 2 is the cubed root of 8 or 81/3, but he wasn’t sure when a problem was asking for you to find the base, which would be a problem like cubed root of 8 asking you to evaluate that the cubed root of 8 is 2, or when you have 23 and need to find the product of 2*2*2. This was because this notation and language was all brand new to him. I took this hint and took a step back to discuss the language associated with exponents and radicals, and made him a key of which symbols correspond to which math language. This seemed to really help him grasp which process to use when.

It was intriguing to see the differences between teaching this to an ELL student compared to 8th grade students native to Vermont. The biggest factor that makes these two experiences differ so much was in the familiarity with mathematics language and notation. One thing that was helpful to W was when my placement partner made an analogy of exponent notation by drawing a picture. This is something that blew my mind because I hadn’t seen this analogy before, and the visual representation really helped our student to grasp the concept of the notation better. As seen in the picture below, the roots of the tree represents the base number, and the branches represent the exponent. This helped to show the notation and that the exponents is the number written higher than the base. The larger the exponent is, the longer the branch is, so we can think of this to show that exponents with the same base get increasing larger as the exponent increases. In addition, it is good to use the roots of the tree as the base because when you reverse this process you must take the root. For example, 8 is the base, 2 is the exponent, and it shows that 82 is 64. When you reverse this, you take 64 and use the exponent as the root, so that would be the square root 64 which gives you the base, 8. This visual helped to remind our student that in order to find the base you must take the root.

Lesson Reflection

This semester I had the wonderful opportunity of co-teaching a 60 minute lesson on Love and Sexuality within Adolescent Development to my education class of college sophomores. My partner and I had been working on this lesson plan for a few weeks, but what threw me off is that as we planned our lesson more and more it started to be very different than the lesson plan we had originally created. Our activities matched up for the most part, but the content we presented and the means of presenting it greatly differed from our original idea of what we were going to do for this lesson. At first I was very nervous that these didn’t match, but after delivering the lesson and observing the discussion among the students, I was greatly impressed with the topics that students brought up during the class discussions. Even though some comments were tangents from the original topic, there were incredible conversations in the classroom during our lesson in which I’m very glad students had. This made me realize that it’s okay for the lesson to be different from the plan.

The content of this lesson included how types of love and stages of love affects adolescence, the effect of how society views love, and acceptance in sexuality, especially within the LGB community. We began class with bell work of practicing the vocabulary set on Quizlet, with the primary focus of having students review and practice the language associated with our chapter. We found that bell work was a great way to begin the class because it helped to immediately focus the students on classwork and helped them review the chapter they were assigned to read for class. Students were able to use the study guide and Quizlet vocabulary set we provided to review these terms during bell work.

We then jumped into how love and sexuality is unique during adolescent years and how it affects adolescents. In this portion of our lesson we reviewed Brown's Phases of Love and Sternberg's Theory of Love, and discussed how these phases are based on age and development. For Brown's Stages of Love we showed NearPod Slides with definitions and examples of each phase. To show that students understood these phases we had them apply their knowledge of it by creating a visual representation of a phase in small groups. Then, after having students take a minute to jot down the main differences between the first and last phase, we showed the comedy sketch, If Adults Dated Like Middle Schoolers. This video clip is an exaggeration on just how different the first and last phases are, which was followed by a class discussion on how age and maturity directly affects Brown's Stages of Love.

During this portion of the lesson, one group of students got confused on the difference between Brown's phases of Love and Sternberg's Theory of Love, and made a poster on a type of love rather than a phase of love. This moment stood out to me because as a teacher it is of utmost importance to clarify concepts for students, which I do not feel I did well with in this lesson. I focused all my attention to thinking about the lesson going smoothly and thinking about how I rehearsed for the lesson to go, that I did not focus my attention on the students. If I had been properly focusing on students I would have caught the confusion early on when they first started to make a poster, however the many thoughts of what to remember for the lesson consumed my mind. While reading through the chapter and planning the lesson I should have caught that these two concepts are pretty similar and made it a point to show clear distinction between them to help students understand it. I recognize that I should have put more emphasis on the difference between the two concepts, however in the moment when students were sharing their posters it was too late for me to fix it. At this point I had complimented the group on their work and their understanding of that type of love, then proceeded to offer corrective feedback and move on, not to call out too much attention to that group of students. Later in the lesson this error came back into play in a positive way.

To teach the types of love within Sternberg's Theory of Love, we gave formal definitions of the three elements that go into the types of love, which are intimacy, commitment, and passion. We then displayed a graphic organizer of this theory on the board in the front of the classroom while students completed an activity. Students were given sticky notes with each of the seven types of love on them and were to read scenarios that were scattered around the room and match the scenario with the type of love they thought it described. Students used the graphic organizer displayed and the study guides or Quizlet set we provided them with in order to define of each kind of love and match it to an example. This activity went well for the most part. Majority of the sticky notes under each scenario was the correct term that went along with it. There were two scenarios, however, that students got the definitions backwards on, so I used the graphic organizer and definitions to clarify the two definitions and give an additional example to help clear up the confusion. For the scenario that went with the type of love that a group of students accidentally made a poster on earlier in the lesson, every student correctly matched the type of love. I made a point to recognize that because of the amazing job the students did earlier, our whole class had a good grasp on understanding this concept for this activity.

The next part of the lesson we shifted the focus to how society views love and sexuality. We had a guest speaker (one of our classmates) share with the class her experience in tutoring her ELL student. This was extremely relevant to both the class placements and this chapter because her student has mentioned to her on occasion comments about the ELL student's arranged marriage. This began our class discussion on how various cultural attitudes towards love and marriages could potentially affect our ELL students and students of other cultures. Within this discussion the class identified that these students of other cultures are affected socially, academically, and culturally by such varying cultural attitudes toward love. These were the three ways I wanted to point out to the class, however through a very thorough and thoughtful class discussion, the students concluded that before I said anything about it, which I was very proud of and happy to see.

Next, we had students do a gender boxing activity to identify common stereotypes and gender roles of males and females both within relationships and within society. We separated our class into males and females so that a mix of gender would not influence the lists made. After reconvening and making a combined list of these gender stereotypes, we shared the first minute of the comedy sketch Role Reversal: What if Women were like Men and then discussed how stereotypes can influence the actions of adolescents. This discussion transformed into how creating an accepting community among students in your classroom can encourage students to embrace who they are, which brought us to the next part of the lesson.

The final part of our lesson was on acceptance among the LGBTQ+ community, which is important to discuss with future educators, as sexuality is a huge pressure among adolescents. We explained to students that LGB youth are statistically at higher risk of anxiety, suicide, depression, and other mental health issues than their heterosexual peers. Adolescence is a time when you are developing your identity, and the pressure of sexual identity is something many adolescents struggle with. We then shared ideas of ways to support our students in the LGBTQ+ community.

To wrap up class we had our students complete an exit ticket of 3 ways they can support students, 2 new things they learned, and 1 question they have for myself and my partner. This was a great way to summarize what we wanted students to take away from the lesson. At the beginning of class we asked that throughout the class period that students keep a list in their notebook where they would brainstorm how to support adolescents. Throughout this lesson we facilitated discussions of the topics listed above, of which our students had phenomenal contributions to. It was really incredible to see the different connections that students made to current issues, other chapters in the text, our ELL tutoring placements, the community within a classroom, and several other topics.

Though our lesson was on love and sexuality in adolescence, one of our priorities was to emphasize to our classmates the idea that as teachers we are to support our students. This is something I noticed our professor has been really emphasizing to us all semester, so we thought this would be a great way to tie it into our teaching. Adolescence entails great stress as one transforms from a child to an adult, so as teachers we must be aware of the challenges students may face so we can support them both academically and emotionally when needed.

The technology we used throughout the lesson varied from the Quizlet app, to NearPod slides, to poster paper, to YouTube videos, to use of the whiteboard, and more. It was really interesting to experiment with different types of technology accessible to teachers and figure out how to best use technology in a classroom setting. We were excited to play with various types of technology used in varying teaching methods, and figured that using one type of technology throughout the entire lesson may be rather monotonous. We decided that this way of switching things up would grab the attention of the students to help engage them better in the content and corresponding in-class activities.

One way of incorporating our knowledge of WIDA standards and scaffolding instruction to meet the needs of other learners is through our graphic organizer. Our students used this visual to do the scenario activity, which is also a great way to help ELL students by scaffolding instruction, as well as appeal to visual learners. We must keep in mind that there are different types of learners within our classroom, and that in order to effectively present content we must appeal to each type of learner. I am a kinesthetic learner, meaning that I learn best by doing something hands-on. Through the lesson I attempted to appeal to each of the main types of learners. When we had students get up to move around and place one of the types of love under the scenario that it had applied to. This was one way of getting students interacting with the material, and kinesthetic learners may have benefited from this activity, poster making, and the gender boxing activity. In addition, I appealed to the visual learners through graphic organizers, videos, poster making, and having NearPod slides out in front of them. The auditory learners may have benefited from listening to the class discussions, videos, and explanations of content throughout the lesson. Lastly, students had the opportunity to keep an ongoing list of student support strategies they brainstormed throughout the class, so this may appeal to the reading and writing learners. This course has helped me to understand that as teachers we must pay attention to the needs of our students, whether it be academically or emotionally, and it has helped me to find many ways to do such a task.

I got to practice many teacher skills through this wonderful opportunity of teaching a lesson to my education class, of which includes lesson planning, engaging students through activities, using technology to present content, and more. I thought it was very interesting to use the things we have previously learned in class to do this lesson, and I am glad that within our lesson we emphasized how teachers are affected. This is why we had students list ways of supporting students, and through class discussions many topics were brought up relating to how we can build our skill sets as future educators. Overall, I found this lesson as a great opportunity to practice my own teaching skills in more ways than I thought it would.

WIDA Standards

I believe my ELL student is at level 2, as I have witnessed him describe places and events, ask and write wh- questions regularly, and connect oral descriptions to real-life experiences or content related examples. I wonder about how to help him expand his reading abilities, because I've had him read aloud to me before and he seemed to understand the definitions of most words individually, but struggled with how the language fit together to mean something more.

Teaching Strategies

     Throughout the semester, my Adolescent Development class is to keep a master list of teaching strategies we come across. I find this to be an extremely helpful tool we can use not only during the lessons we teach to our class this semester, but also in classes to come in the future of our undergraduate education courses. This will also be a great tool to utilize when it comes time to student teach during senior year. Attached here is our Strategy Log with a variety of teaching strategies and techniques.