Week 4 Reflection in the Classroom (3rd Grade)

Week 4 was a very eventful week at Jones Elementary. All of the teachers had to go to an hour long conference on Monday, so I got to go over a chapter with the class for their social studies lesson. They were reading about the branches of government and the balancing of powers in Washington. After going over some of the information, I asked them why they thought it was not a good idea to have one branch, or even one person, be in control of everything. What did they think might happen? For a few moments, the students sat quiet, then responses began pouring in: “one person might make a law that was unfair” came from a bright boy at the back of the room. A girl up front mentioned a concern: “what if they made all girls not be able to go outside?" I pointed out that in many countries, women don’t have as many rights as men for this very reason. It also might lead to total control by one person, called a “dictator”. Many already knew this term and mentioned Hitler as being a dangerous type of figure. Later, in a section on the Supreme Court building, they looked at pictures comparing it with Greek architecture and ruins, quickly seeing many of the similarities such as the large columns we use in many of our high ranking buildings today.

I had planned on teaching my first Geometry lesson on Wednesday afternoon on the different types of triangles, but there were some schedule changes, so I just decided to come in on Friday to teach it since I have no classes on that day. It turned out to be a tremendous learning experience. My lesson involved introducing an assortment of triangles and having the children make many of these on geoboards that Ms. Spake had provided. Too add depth to the discussion, and also to provide a link to prior knowledge and real life learning, I brought in a collage of many ordinary, everyday items that contained triangles. These included pictures of a sailboat, the top of a house, a mountaintop, slices of pie, tortilla chips and others. What I had not planned for was the transition time between discussing the topic and actually implementing the lesson. Passing out the geoboards, and then the rubber bands to use on them, I found that I truly had planned poorly for all of the time this seemed to take. In my mind beforehand, of course, it was pictured as flowing easily, but the kids were restless and continually seemed to be getting off task. Although they did seem to get a great deal from my instruction on triangles and making them on the boards, I felt it could have went much smoother. Luckily, Ms. Spake gave great feedback to me about the things that worked, the things that could be changed as well as steps to modify. Rather than having them each do their own triangles and being on different pages from each other, it would have been better to go through it slowly and methodically, step by step with them. They could all construct one triangle and hold it up for me to see before we moved on as a class. Since the next group would be coming in for Geometry, she asked if I would teach the lesson again to them. Agreeing to this, I found myself going through it a second time: only now, things seemed to flow much better. I took time to let the students describe triangles they see every day, asked them to point out ones they saw in the classroom, and went through each type of triangle thoroughly. Students were heavily involved this time, even coming up to the geoboard showing me how a right triangle could be “flipped”, and still be a right triangle. I found that my confidence had gained a bit since last time, and my more relaxed attitude permeated the class and the rest of my lesson. Generally, they all stayed on task with every item I had them do, and the difference was like night and day. After they went on to music, Ms. Spake went over the points of my lesson with me. She told me that often, teaching a lesson a second time will give you the needed room to improve on things that didn’t work, and can also cement in the things that did. Later, she had to leave for about thirty minutes and I was in the room with her parapro teacher. The students were working on their math sheets and I happened to notice that one girl was mumbling something to herself as she worked. It turns out that it was one of the concepts I had taught them to help them remember the name for an isosceles triangle: “I see two sides that are the same, like my two eyes, isosceles.” It was really amazing how seemingly small, insignificant changes can make a world of difference in a lesson. In everything we do, we always learn and evolve. As C.S. Lewis once said, “Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn . . . my God, you learn.”