Practicum- Sharing a lesson

This is a lesson that I taught in an algebra 1 class today at McNary High School. The objective for the lesson was for the students to be able to write an equation, a chart, and a graph from a word problem. The students had already been doing this for the past two days, so I was pretty confident that they could complete the task quickly. After the warm-up, I broke up the lesson into 3 sections. In the first section I went over a group/class problem and checked for understanding by a combination of randomly calling on students to contribute and doing a thumb check. As usual, it was hard to get a good picture of understanding with the thumb count because there was limited student participation. However, I think I was able to keep most of the students tracking by calling random names.  

The second section was individual work on a problem like the one that I did with the class. During this section I tried to go around and answer questions for student who were struggling. During this section of the class I was bombarded by quite a few students who wanted to go to the restroom/get a drink of water/ etc. Also, the students who finished with the problem quickly were left wondering what to do next. On the positive side, I think the students who got the one-on-one attention understood the concept much better than they had the previous days. I was also checking to see how students were doing by glancing down at their papers. I think enough students are having difficulty with it that I may do another review problem with the same concepts for a warm-up tomorrow.

The third section was supposed to be a short amount of time for the students to do homework in class, but I didn’t set that expectation strong enough in the beginning of the class so once students were done with the in-class problem they decided it was time to talk and goof-off. In reflecting back this was the section that needed the most work. If I were to reteach this lesson, I would add more structure to the lesson and pulled the students’ attention back to me more. I think if I would have had a little bit more for the students to do in –class, and if I would done a better job of setting up the layout of the class in the beginning, this last section would have gone much smoother. Yesterday’s lesson went much smoother, but the students had quite a bit more to do, giving it more structure.