- Lesson Planschelsea Bagwell's Teaching Portfolio Grade
- Lesson Planschelsea Bagwell's Teaching Portfolio
Unit Plan
The following books on teaching portfolios are available for check-out in the Center for Teaching’s library. Seldin, Peter, The Teaching Portfolio: A Practical Guide to Improved Performance. The artist’s portfolio shows his or her artistic abilities, whereas the teacher’s portfolio shows his or her knowledge, skills, and abilities related to teaching. They are developed for a specific audience. The artist’s audience is a poten-tial employer, and the teacher.
Description of the Unit
I taught this literacy unit to a small group of third grade students during the reading block. The group consisted of fourteen students, all of whom were lower performing students in the area of reading. I used poetry as the avenue through which the students would write about an object using adjectives. I used this lesson in writing using adjectives so the students could receive practice in both reading and writing.
The learning objectives for this project were: thestudents will describe a mystery object using three senses: hear, feel, and see, and use these senses to create a short poem on their mystery object. In addition, the students will understand what a simile is and how to write using small poems using similes.
Instruction
Since I taught this project to the reading group, it took a clear and explicit explanation of what we were doing to get them interested in writing during their reading time. I established purpose by letting my students know that using descriptive words helps us improve our vocabularies to become better readers and writers. In addition, I said that when we have experience writing in different ways (such as stories, letters or poems) it helps us understand how these different pieces of writing are made, making it easier for us to read and understand them. I also said that in doing this writing project, we were practicing our developing skills in writing, which is very important in getting us more familiar with text and print and how we write. Lastly, I told them why I had the object in a box: because we often describe things based on what they look like, not how they feel or smell or sound. I said that using our senses would help us practice creating the best descriptions possible for our mystery object.
For my adaptations, I needed to accommodate a very diverse group of learners. I included a lot of teacher modeling, one-on-one help, and varying types of activities: large group, partner work, and individual work time throughout my lessons. I aimed to get the students to work with their peers and with me to make this a purposeful activity in building our skills in using descriptive words in our writing. During partner and individual work, I strategically placed students in spots where they would get work completed without distractions by assigning the students a specific seat for the day. I also put students together based on their ability to work together and learn from each other: partnering the higher functioning students with the lower functioning students. In addition, when a student was absent during a session, I had that student partner up with a student who could help them complete the activity (with a higher functioning student). I also had a review session on the second day of the project in which the students debriefed the activity for their peers who were absent. This review worked not only as a description for those students who were absent, but it reinforced the purpose of the writing project and what we had been working on.
Post-Analysis
Style warsgraffiti movies & documentaries. As I began this project, I had high hopes that my students would dive into it with full interest and understand and achieve all of the goals I had determined that they should meet. However, during the first day of my project, the lesson did not go as planned, and the students were not clear on the goals or purpose of the lesson. The students were unengaged, lacked the motivation to work through the steps of the lesson that I had laid out, and did not care to work very hard on this project.
In order to revive my project, I took this teachable moment to collaborate with my students the next day in order to find a method to successfully teach the lesson. I gave them a choice of either continuing with our previous days’ mystery object and then we would write a short poem using similes about it, or to start over with a new mystery object and follow through with the rest of the project and call the previous days’ lesson a practice session. To my delight, the students chose the second option and we started anew. They loved the new object and were very attentive and ready to record their observations and write about the mystery object throughout the lesson. While I had made copies of the organizer for the project, I think the students felt more comfortable using their notebooks, so I just had them record student input in their journals, where they had lined paper and they could keep track of their list very easily.
I was very happy with the first day of the project, but still, my vision of the poems using similes was not clear yet. Since I had observed the lesson and saw what my students knew, I decided that perhaps the sessions where we used our senses was great practice on getting the students to be thinking about descriptive words. I wanted my students to consider different aspects of an object: the feel, the appearance, how is sounds, and if it tastes like anything.
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Since my goal was to get the students to imagine objects as more than their appearance, I did something very different on the second day of the project. I assigned them partners and gave them a note card with a mystery object on it. The students were to write four sentences about their mystery object and try to have their peers guess what it was they were describing. This exercise proved to be a great assessment in how my students had understood the purpose of the other sessions: to get practice in describing objects in more than one way: to describe its appearance, the way it feels, how it smells, and how is tastes. To see how my students understood the exercise was eye-opening. While some students’ work demonstrated their understanding of similes and descriptive words, another student’s work showed that he did not grasp the concept as successfully as his peers. This work is from one of the quieter students in my group. In seeing his work, I was very surprised to see his write up. In knowing what he is capable of in terms of writing, it seems that he rushed through this assignment very quickly.
In reflecting on the project as a whole, I can see that student misunderstanding started with the purpose of writing a poem. I called what they were writing a poem because they were writing short and descriptive sentences about an object. They were not writing a paragraph about their object, just a simple description of the object. I focused too much attention on the mystery object portion of the project, instead of the poetry writing portion of the project, and this is what attributed to a lost purpose for some of my students.
I also think I let the purpose get away from me when we moved from writing descriptive our words as a group to the individual/partner portion of the activity. While I thought I was explaining their task clearly, and making an obvious connection between the descriptive word lists, to the writing of their poems, the students lost track of what we were doing, and I ended up walking around and retelling the instructions for the task to each partner group.
Lesson Planschelsea Bagwell's Teaching Portfolio Grade
One very important thing I learned from this experience out in the field is that when going into a lesson, a clear vision of the activity or project is necessary for a beginning teacher. However, to determine if the purpose is clear, it is critical to sit down and reflect on each portion of the lesson and determine if the activity and expectations of students are clear to you (the person teaching the lesson). I think I lacked this reflection going into my lesson. I needed to examine my thoughts about the final product of this writing project in order to provide my students with a clear purpose for doing this lesson.
Lesson Planschelsea Bagwell's Teaching Portfolio
Not only is it important to have a purpose, but it is essential to understand the different levels of performance among the student group when going into a project. What I learned with this project was that the level of structure for this writing activity (giving the prompt: My mystery object is as _____ as a _____) was the ideal amount of structure for some of my students. For one of my students who is learning English, the prompt helped him focus on the descriptive word part of the task, making the activity a feasible lesson for him to complete. While it is hard to decipher the first part of the sentence, he understands the structure: use an adjective for the first word, and a noun as the second word to compare the object to something they know. He was using the sense of feel and sight for this sentence, and he used the adjective and noun in the correct spot, but the adjective “huge” did not quite fit, as he was meaning a small book. With more practice, he will begin to understand the importance of choosing words that fit in a simile comparison.
Having seen “Henry’s” work, I think if I would have really thought it through, I would have used this sentence as an adaptation for my lower performing students, as it was apparent that the prompt was necessary for “Henry.” However, I have a higher performing student in my reading group for whom this promptwas a little easy for him. In examining his work, he used the prompt correctly, but one sentence was inaccurate: “My mystery object is as wet as the ocean.” It seemed he was using the characteristics of the world to describe his object: a globe. While he may have misunderstood that we needed to describe the actual object and not what the object represented (the world), he used beautiful descriptive words and nouns to describe his globe. It would have been better for this student to have had more freedom in this writing activity, as he is always writing a story that he’s been working on for a month, and more practice writing in a different genre with more flexibility would have been better for him.
If I were to present this writing project again, I would take time to explain the purpose and goals of the project to my student. I think this was lacking in my project, as the students wrote their sentences, but this activity was not seen as the primary purpose of the exercise. I think the purpose for my students was fun, and not to work on using descriptive words in the format of a poem. I would also do the project myself, and see where potential roadblocks could come up. If I had done this, I would have seen that this writing project was too vague to complete with third graders.
For my lessons, I would restructure them to flow more naturally and figure out beforehand how much practice I would give my students, and give them purpose for practicing so much. I think we had a lot of practice, and very little to show for how much class time we used for this project. I would also revise the lessons to include a more structured writing prompt for my lower students, and more freedom (as said previously) for my high students. The structure was a good aide for some students, but impeded the writing process for others.
The most valuable lesson in this project was that if it seems unclear to me, it will not become clearer as the project moves ahead. I am the one responsible for my students’ learning and if I am confused about the format of a particular part of the lesson, it will not magically appear once I start teaching. I must plan out each lesson and be sure that each session is clear to me, so I can explain it to my students with confidence while having the purpose of the project in mind.
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