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.
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