For this
assignment, I used a mixture of two 8th Grade students, my wife (a kindergarten
teacher) and the parents of the two students for a class size of 7 people.
I began the lesson by explaining the purpose of the lesson as well as the
assignment that they would be completing.
As my “students” came from many different backgrounds, I figured it
would be best to provide a bit more historical background for the lesson.
For my pre-assessment I prepared a
Power-Point presentation with additional information about the political
parties in existence at the time of the ratification of the Constitution. During this presentation I tried to ask questions
of the class as a means to gauge their level of understanding and knowledge of
the subject matter, but for the most part I was lecturing off of the
PowerPoint. I also provided a clipping
from a newspaper article from that time era.
We will discuss the contents of the article as well as some of the
political aspects that it documents (notably the
The class responded well to the
pre-assessment activities. They listened
intently to the power-point presentation, raised interesting questions about
the material, and provided thoughtful answers to questions posed to them. The extensive information provided to them at
the outset served to show them what was expected from them for this lesson.
In order to ensure that my rubric
was a fair measure for the students, I focused on how the two 8th
graders were performing during the pre-assessment. They were quite engaged in the material and
answered my questions with well-reasoned responses. The difficulty lies in the fact they are top
students in their class, so they do not represent the majority of students I
will encounter as a teacher. Thus, the
expectations in my rubric may be too difficult for many students to attain when
compared to these two students. Still,
based on these two students, I would not alter my rubric. They were able to easily follow the lesson
and what would be expected of them to complete the assignment.
By providing my class with a
thorough pre-assessment introduction that provided them with a lot of
information, it made the remainder of the lesson easy for them. I had given them all the background
information needed in order to complete the assignments and to understand what
was expected of them in the class. I
provided an information dump that they fortunately were able to process and
understand.
I found that my lesson, especially
in the pre-assessment phase, was spent mainly lecturing and providing
information to the students. I did this
intentionally as I did not know what information the students would be bringing
to this particular class, which would affect their ability to complete the work. I tried to incorporate questions to the class
in order to assess what they knew of the material and how well they were
understanding the lesson. Still, due to the disparate backgrounds of the
students, I felt I had to provide more information than I ordinarily would.
In essence, this provides an example
of how important bridging is in moving from one lesson to the next. In a normal class, I would be providing a
bridge from the previous day’s material to today’s material, and the
information in today’s class would be built upon the prior day’s knowledge
foundation. If I have done a good job
laying the foundation in previous classes, then the bridging can serve as a
supplement to that prior lesson.
Instead, as shown by what I had to do in this particular class, if they
do not have that foundational knowledge, a great deal of time must be spent
providing that information.
What I would certainly change in a
regular class would be to provide a more student led lesson as opposed to
having me lecture for so much of the pre-assessment period. I would prefer to determine what they already
know through a question and answer session and have them spell out what they
hope to learn from the lesson. In the
end we can look back upon what they hoped to learn with what they actually
learned as a means to reinforce the information provided to them during the
lesson. Such strategies would keep the
students more engaged in the lesson while also reinforcing the material learned
previously.
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