Instructional Planning #2

To repeat what I wrote in my blog last week, I only taught basics to my summer school class, and as the weeks have progressed, I am sitting on the sidelines more and more, giving the reigns to my First-Years.

During the time that I was teaching, however, there were some lessons that seemed to work better than others. There are a few different ways of measuring the success of a lesson: 1) How well the students do on the assessment, 2) much their skills have improved during the course of the lesson, etc. I am focusing on just 1 and 2 for this blog. If I were to use the students’ post-assessment as the standard for the most successful class, then I would be talking only about the lesson on Order of Operations. My students mastered this one, no problem. However, I am willing to bet that if they were given a pre-assessment, prior to the lesson, they would have mastered that as well. They came in knowing this stuff. Looking at the second standard of success, Classifying Triangles and Quadrilaterals was the lesson where I saw the most change throughout the period of one class. Of course, I only had one student for this lesson (which may have allowed for more one-on-one time), but she still came in unable to say anything definite about the classification of these shapes, and left having classified everything given to her. I think some key reasons for the success of this lesson were class size, small objective (nothing too dense or lofty), tangibles/manipulatives (she had her own envelope full of shapes that she was asked to match up), and constant questioning. Were I to do this lesson again, I might focus more on the manipulatives: have her make her own, find the missing angles of the triangles, show how two trapezoids can make a parallelogram, etc.

The lesson that the students and I had the least success with was Properties. I attempted to condense associative, commutative, and distributive all in one lesson. What I really should have done, and would do in the normal school year, is spend a period on associative and commutative, and another whole period on just distributive. The reason for this is the type of algebra that is contained in the distributive property is not immediately comprehensible. Regardless of the student’s level, I think it takes a whole period to really grasp and become comfortable with the distributive property. I would also put more manipulatives into this lesson if I had the chance. I used posters with the original lesson, but I think an activity which gets the students to actually distribute something out would help to tighten this idea of distributing numbers.