EDUL 6020
Principles of Curriculum Design and Instruction
Reflection on Colleague
For this Capstone assignment, I chose to observe a third year mathematics teacher who is in his second year of teaching at our school. Mr. J. is also a well-liked football and baseball coach and has a good relationship with all of the students at GHS.
Teachers at GHS have a mandatory common planning period before school one day each week. During this time, the first fifteen to twenty minutes is spent on housekeeping type announcements and discussions, and the final twenty minutes or so is devoted purely to lesson planning. Generally, there are two to three teachers who share the lesson planning duties and they switch off each week. With this schedule, each teacher plans lessons about every third week and they are shared with other teachers within the department.
When I observed Mr. J., he had several essential questions written on the board so that students would know what the lessons of the week would entail. No mention was made of the essential questions themselves, so it was not clear if the students paid any attention to them. It could be that the students have become so used to seeing writing on that particular part of the board that it just becomes wall art instead of a learning device. The lesson began without students identifying or recording their own learning goals for the day.
Mr. J. was introducing new material. He activated prior knowledge and related the lesson to real-life situations by using baseball and football examples to teach the concept of parallel and perpendicular lines in Algebra. The students were required to take notes during the lesson and record everything that was written on the Smartboard into their math notebooks. If a student was off task, he reminded the class that notes were worth extra credit if turned in completed on test day. Guided and individual practice was given throughout the lesson and questions were answered as needed. Collaborative pair groups checked each others math calculations on the individual practice. After the lecture, the students were given about seven in-class practice problems to work on at their desks. After most students were finished, Mr. J. reviewed concepts and assigned a brief homework assignment form the textbook.
From this observation, I think that Mr. J. was fairly effective in his use of instructional time when looking specifically at instructional strategies and curriculum design. He successfully included five out of the nine categories of strategies that have a high probability of improving student achievement. At the beginning of the lesson, Mr. J. activated prior knowledge by doing a very brief review from previous lessons. He then identified similarities and differences in lines with his anecdotal baseball and football examples. This strategy also fulfilled the nonlinguistic representation category by helping the students to create a mental picture of parallel and perpendicular lines. Since Mr. J. teaches a mixed group of general and special education students, he effectively used cooperative learning when he paired students seated next to each other to check basic math calculations during individual practice. I observed higher level students helping others who did not quite understand how to work the problems. Finally, Mr. J. provided students with opportunities to practice the new information and skills through guided and individual practice, as well as the brief homework assignment.