Video 1 Reflection

Planning:

I liked how the teachers, principal, and the math coach all sat down together to discuss how they were going to take notes from the lesson Ms. Lewis was about to teach. This meeting allowed everyone to be on the same page so they knew the expectations on how they are supposed to interact with the students and what the key ideas they want to take note of. Ms. Lewis and the math coach had planned out a lesson that re-teaches problem solving with the use of addition and subtraction. I liked their plan of going over poster examples as a whole class and then letting the students reflect on their work they had previously done and make any corrections or additions to their work after discussing the example problems.

 
Lesson:

Ms. Lewis started with the example posters with the students sitting up front on the rug. I thought this was good information and instruction, however it did not follow their plan of action and not many of the posters were covered since too much time was spent on the first one. Some of the same students kept participating, which is good. However, it would have been nice to see more overall participation from the whole class during the whole group poster activity. Ms. Lewis strayed from the plan when students got their work back. They had planned to only have the students work on 3 and 4 individually or to verbally say what they were doing. Teachers and observers were not supposed to interact in a way to aid or give answers. The small clip shown of the math coach showed her interacting with the student to understand their thought process, but she did not help the student or say whether their process was right or wrong. Ms. Lewis was helping a student through one of the problems, which wasn't part of the lesson plan.


Debrief:

I thought Ms. Lewis's reflection was spot on. She recognized that she took too much time in the beginning and was only able to get to a few of the posters. She also recognized that the lesson as a whole was not as she had planned. I like how they explained the rest of the posters that were not shown during the lesson so that the observers were then aware of what additional resources the intended lesson was supposed to be.
 

Overall:

I thought this video provided a nice example of how teachers collaborate and how they continually try to improve their teaching methods to help their students. I have already done my novice teaching experience and I can definitely relate to how the plan and actual lesson were different! No matter how much you plan and prepare for a lesson, you never know what may throw off the pace of the lesson. Students were struggling with the first poster, so Ms. Lewis spent more time on this than she had intended. I thought she did a great job adapting the lesson on the go. When teachers realize their students are not getting a topic, they need to step back and adjust the lesson plan from what they had initially planned. Same with if students are easily getting the topic, teachers can adjust the speed so that students move through the material at an appropriate rate.