Reflection on Teaching a Lesson

Last Friday I had the opportunity to teach a lesson plan of my own design to three students from the class which I observe as part of learning to be a teacher.  (If you are interested in reading the lesson I taught from, it is available as a document here and is labeled “Tech Lesson Plan,” but don’t confuse it with the “Lesson Plan Idea” linked on the side, the idea I started with is not really at all related to where I ended up for a variety of reasons.)  The lesson was designed to allow students to explore probability and bar graphs.  I used the bar graph and spinner provided free by the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives from here and taught the students in the computer lab.  One note, I intended to amend my lesson plan to allow for a culminating wiki where students could compare their observations and learning with that of other students to create and continuously building probability resource.  However, I was faced with the “problem” of my group being so engaged by the spinner and initial portion of the lesson plan that it became apparent that I was better off letting them experiment with spinner variables than trying to introduce another technology.  They were so engrossed that they asked to skip lunch to keep manipulating the spinner and when I told them they had to eat they instead demanded the url of the site so that they could go home and use it.  They even enjoyed creating the bar graph, although I only had them do this initially; it didn’t make sense to me for them to continue to create and alter a manual bar graph when the spinner creates its own bar graph automatically.  That way the students could work on graphing skills initially and then focus only on probability for the rest of the lesson.

While teaching I noticed that having one computer per child was ideal and allowed for individual exploration and customized learning.  (I went to teach and saw that I wrote 4-8 per computer on my lesson plan and couldn’t believe my own audacity, more than 2 would probably bee undesirable.)  I also became uncertain as to how much a wiki would really augment their learning; as much as I want them to collaborate, the limitations of probability knowledge for third graders no longer seems enough to fill a wiki.  Maybe if the wiki was school wide and covered different levels it might work but my focus turned out to be rather limiting.

In summary, this lesson was really helpful in allowing me to see how technology affects students and to discover the limitations imposed by only sporadically using technology instead of incorporating it seamlessly into the curriculum for the year.  And it was really exciting to see students so engaged.