Lesson+Plan+2+Reflection

This lesson is listed second on my list here but it represents a great number of extra teaching experiences. At this point I have been teaching a Precalculus class for an entire chapter. As the lesson plan denotes this lesson was for the fourth part of the chapter, but each part has been divided among several days’ worth of lessons. At this point I am about three weeks into teaching this class every day. I have grown accustomed to the flow of the class and how the students behave with the work that they are given. The lesson as a whole went well. This was given the Friday of Homecoming week and the students were much energized. They did settle themselves down and worked well for the time that we had. One problem that I was fighting the entire class which affected my presentation was that the classes for the day were all 10 minutes shorter than average in order to accommodate an assembly at the end of the day. One thing that I have been having troubles with lately has been remembering to review the previous day’s assignments and answering questions that the students have. I have become so acclimated to the university life style of going to my own professors with questions I had forgotten that the students here do not do that. I was in the process of moving on to new material hen I remembered that the students needed this review. I had to force myself to stop and segue into the review to make it look normal and planned. It could have been a lot smoother but at least I went back to do it. I need to work on how my transitions bridge from one topic to another. One thing that came up during the lesson that I had not figured on was that the students were not able to factor different items that I had planned as examples. I know that the students have experience with quadratic equations and factoring them, but I forget that they do not have the experience of volume that I am used to. I placed two different quadratic equations on the display and asked the students to factor them. I know that I came across as frustrated when they were not able to do it and I had to reprimand myself for so doing. Over the course of the lesson we were able to cover the materials that I had planned. From the original notes that were shared with me from other teachers in the building (on account of having all the students of a particular subject learning the same things at the same time) I found a flaw and I was able to correct it. This will allow my students to have a better chance to succeed. I later shared the correction with the other teacher to allow her students the same opportunity if she hadn’t caught the mistake as well. The lesson that I had this time was designed so that a person familiar with the math concepts would be able to pick up the lesson and know where I was going with it. I corrected this feature from what I have posted as “Lesson 1”. The one place that might be a little difficult is my opening questions that were designed to direct the thoughts of the students into the intended lesson. This lesson was still high on being teacher centered but I am working on developing more student involvement into the day. This seems to be the greatest challenge that I will have with this curriculum for the year.


 * The evaluation of my Master Teacher can be found at this link: [|Lesson 2 Eval.pdf].