In my Literacy in a Middle/High School class we have been studying the use of vocabulary in our content areas. More specifically, we have been looking at ways in which we can go about teaching our future students the vocabulary. We did this through many readings and class/group discussions, and then we were asked to go a bit further. Our professor asked us to take what we had learned and create our own mini-lesson on vocabulary terms related to our content area. We were allowed to teach however many words we pleased, as long as we created a lesson that would reflect our learning and had the ability to facilitate our students' learning. Once we did this, we actually taught the lesson to a couple of our fellow classmates and recorded our lesson.
Attached is the link to my lesson plan and a video of my lesson.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SEaeAIxsJYRea_spo1Fg3TrWwHwi2ZT3oMaMvdVYaZo/edit
I feel that overall this process taught me quite a bit about myself as a teacher. Watching the video back, I was able to realize that I have gained so much confidence standing at the front of the classroom when compared to when I first started in the education program. In fact, I watched one of my old teaching videos from a year ago and compared it to this one, and I seemed like a different person. I could see tremendous improvement in my body language, confidence, comfort, tone of voice, and just overall presence. To see these improvements was incredible. At the beginning of my lesson I asked my "students" to take note on if I used the words "like" and "you guys" too much. When watching the video over I was impressed with myself in the sense that I didn't catch myself using "like" at all. On the other hand, I found myself cringing at how often I used "you guys". Despite this, my classmates all said that they didn't notice me using "like" or "you guys" at all, and one noted that even if I did it wasn't often enough or in a way that it distracted them from their learning.
I learned that teaching students the vocabulary in Mathematics is essential to my students' learning. If they don't understand the terminology that I am using or the book is using, then they may not be able to gain a full understanding of the concepts. Through the readings, discussions, and even my lesson, I was able to see the importance of going deeper than the definition when introducing students to new vocabulary. Instead of simply giving my students a term and the definition that goes along with it, I had them pull from their background knowledge as well as their own experiences to come up with their own definitions, pictures, stories, examples, etc. By allowing for students to have a more prominent role in this process, it allows for them to take ownership in their learning. Not only that, but it helps them gain a deeper understanding of the material when they have to create their own thoughts about the subject, instead of it just being handed to them. Because of this, I think my lesson most closely related to Performance Criteria 7.2: Candidates plan instruction by drawing upon knowledge of learners to meet rigorous learning goals.
Through my students' responses to the exit card, I was able to see that they gained a good base-line understanding of the vocabulary terms. This base-line knowledge was my goal for my students, as I was just introducing students to the vocabulary. In a follow up lesson I would give my students the textbook definitions, as these are very important to have in Mathematics. Once given these definitions we could, as a class, explore through discussions, pictures, games, etc. how the definitions relate to what the students had come up with themselves. It is my hope that the combination of their work along with the actual definitions would help my students gain a greater and deeper understanding of the vocabulary.
When teaching vocabulary lessons in the future I want to take with me everything that I have learned from this lesson. In the future, I would also like to do a better job of preparing myself for possible questions students may have during my lesson. By doing this, it is my hope that I would be able to give my students better explanations, which in turn would help them gain a better understanding. Overall, I thought this lesson was successful, as I could see growth in my students' learning from the beginning to the end of the lesson was seen through their Exit Card responses.
I find myself saying "like" and "you guys" a lot as well. I am finding it difficult to find an alternative to "you guys" just because I use it so often. I like the connection you made to Performance Criterion 7.2, it is important to learn from yourself and to learn from your students and to build off of that knowledge to better help them. I wonder how you will use these strategies in your back to back mini-lessons. I wonder how easy it will be to shift the focus of the class depending on what students are learning or gaining from the initial lesson.
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