Social Studies – Into to Power and Authority Unit
PDP
– This lesson was co-taught with my placement partner. Our goal of time management was met with this lesson, and our co-op teacher gave us great feedback to work on for the following classes: ensuring students are writing where and when they should be, designing our work sheets more clearly, and being more clear in verbal instruction.

ELA – Residential School Video: Active Listening and Reflection
PDP
– This lesson was co-taught with my placement partner. We set a goal of simplifying instructions for students after feedback from the previous week. We did much better with verbal cues, using the whiteboard to help students know what to write, and checking for their understanding, but still needed to make our expectations for their worksheets and their answers more clear for following lessons.

Science – Intro to Cells Unit
PDP
– This was the first lesson I taught alone. My goal was ensuring all students were engaged in the lesson because in the previous weeks there were a few who didn’t follow instructions or didn’t participate. I did really well this week making a simple worksheet for the students so I had more time to check in on the ones who often struggled to keep up. I also had the students show me they completed their work before they moved on which ensured I was able to see every student’s completed work and therefore engagement in the lesson.

Science – Cells Continued (Introduction to Organelles)
PDP
– This lesson was heavy with new vocabulary, so I set a goal of slowing down my speaking and of the introduction to the material itself. I had a lot of trouble speaking slowly, but was able to correct and adjust for it mid-lesson, (which I had to do several times!). I did a good job repeating information and relating it to the week before, but next time I teach this I would have the students say and repeat the words out loud with me.

ELA – Figurative Language
PDP
– The idea for this lesson as well as the accompanying slideshow and handout were given to me by a classmate. I co-taught this, and we set the goal of keeping the class on task and bringing them together for group closure, as we had noticed by this week that the students all worked at totally different speeds and we lacked closure in some previous weeks. We did a great job at keeping them on task, and even “demanded” student attention as our co-op teacher put it. The students were engaged and we had fun with our closure activity.

Health – Self-Image
PDP
– This lesson tackled a difficult topic for a middle-school classroom and I was worried about engagement, so set the goal of waiting longer for student answers. I had trouble letting silence sit during the discussion and tried to offer some prompts and personal examples to help facilitate. Part of the problem was also that my questions weren’t open ended enough, and so it was hard to keep the discussion going; the co-op teacher also suggested I bring in some discussion on social media to help students engage more.