Reflection of My Lesson Plan

Overall, I think the lesson plan went pretty well. I’ve done plenty of lesson plan presentations for other classes, as well as teaching in an actual classroom, but the behavior cards in this class made doing the lesson much more difficult. In order to prepare for the lesson, my partner Kathy and I created the lesson plan and activities needed for the centers. We also made a “Sticking to Great Behavior” chart to use for classroom management with regards to the behavior cards. The first objective of the lesson was for the students to be able to write a prediction about the story after listening to the beginning portion of it. This was assessed using a rubric, which is a summative type of assessment. The other objective was for students to work cooperatively in groups during their centers. We assessed this formatively by just walking around and observing the students at each center. Our lesson plan was not executed exactly how we planned it on paper. First of all our podcast was not loud either and we had to read the story aloud to the students. Also, we did not have enough time for the students to spend at least five minutes at each center. Aside from these two minor glitches, the lesson plan went pretty well. I learned from the students that, as a teacher, you have to have eyes in the back of your head. You always have to be aware and observant of everything that’s going on in your classroom—with both the students who are behaving and especially those who are misbehaving. We definitely could have improved on our podcast. Looking back, the first mistake we made with that was doing it in four different “episodes,” because the story was long. When we went to make the lesson plan, we had to figure out how to incorporate the breaks between each episode. It would have gone much more smoothly if we created only the two episodes—the beginning (where we stopped and had students make predictions) and then the rest of the story in one episode. The second mistake regarding the podcast we discovered when we went to do the lesson and the volume on it was way too low. No one could even hear the story.

Reflection of the Podcast:
As I briefly mentioned above, Kathy and I created four different podcasted “episodes.” We planned on listening to the first episode, stopping, and having the students do a writing activity predicting what will happen in the rest of the story. Then we would listen to the rest of the podcasts. We ended up not using the podcast because the volume on it was too low and the class could not hear it. Obviously, the podcast would have been more effective if we could actually hear it, but also if we only created the two podcasts. That would have made the lesson run more smoothly. Although our podcast for this lesson plan did not go so well, I think the idea of podcasting is extremely effective. It worked well in many of the other lesson plans and definitely could be used in future lesson plans. Aside from having students just listen to podcasts, they can make them themselves.