Reflection On A Lesson Plan Taught: Before Teaching

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Reflection on a Lesson Plan Taught

Virginia Teachers for Tomorrow

Intern Name: Izzy Fernandez


Subject of Lesson: Social Studies
Topic of Lesson: Inventions of the Industrial Revolution
Age/Grade of Students: 6th
Date of Lesson: 5/12/21
Time/Length of Lesson: ~1 hour 30 mins (over two days)

Directions: Write 1-2 paragraphs in each box below. Answer as many of the questions as
possible that apply to your lesson! (When done, you can delete this & the bulleted list of questions.)

Before Teaching:
● How did you determine the subject/topic of this lesson?
● When you received your lesson plan topic, how did you begin?
● What steps did you go through to create this lesson?
● With whom did you talk, discuss, or edit your lesson?
● What feedback was given to you as you planned the lesson, and how did you apply this feedback to
make the lesson plan better, more organized, more clear?
I actually chose the topic of my lesson myself when I looked ahead at the week I would most
likely be teaching my lesson and saw what topics were on the agenda for those days. One of
the topics was the inventions of the Industrial Revolution which I thought would be great with
the assignment I had in mind. Before I even chose my topic, I had found the Netflix template used
for the assignment and figured it would make a great jigsaw (or even solo) activity, so it was just
my luck that the Industrial Revolution topic fit so well with my assignment idea. With all the
different inventions from this time, students could easily choose one and get creative with their
slides for the assignment!

Once I had my topic, I worked on the lesson plan document and the instructions for the
assignment. I edited the Netflix template to include the instructions/requirements for the
students. Around this time, I also met with Mrs. T to talk about how I would structure my lesson,
and she suggested that I ask the students whether they wanted to do the assignment in
groups or individually (they chose to work solo!). By the end of this meeting, I had plans to make
the rest of my materials like the powerpoint, notes sheets, and rubric. Overall, making these
materials wasn’t too difficult. I was able to get everything done fairly quickly and
double-checked everything with Mrs. T a few days before my lesson. With her help, we got
everything on the Schoology page, and, since I had forgotten, we also created the learning
target, agenda, and bellringer questions together.

During Teaching:
● What parts of the lesson plan worked as you anticipated?
● What, if any, adjustments needed to be made once you began?
● How well did you estimate the amount of time the lesson would take? Did you have to make any
adjustments due to the timing?
● How well did you anticipate the materials needed? Are there any materials you could have prepared
differently or more thoroughly?
● How did your students respond to the activities you chose to use?
● If an assessment was used, how did students perform?
When I was creating my first version of the lesson plan, I had planned on the students
completing everything within one class period and having a chance to look at some of the
students’ assignments in front of the class at the end, like a presentation! However, Mrs. T
advised me that the lesson might actually take longer, like a class and a half, since the students
may need more time to finish. I’m glad I trusted her judgment, because she was absolutely right.
Not only did they need a little longer (somewhere around 40 minutes) to complete their
assignments, but my intro powerpoint also took longer to go through than I expected.

We started the lesson off with the bellringer, which the students did a pretty good job of
responding to! Since one of the questions was opinion-based (asking what they would like to
invent), I think they were more eager to respond and share their thoughts. Same with the
open-ended question I started the powerpoint with: What can’t they live without? It seemed like
those really opened the students up to the topic of the lesson and made them more interested
in doing the assignment. About 12 students submitted their assignments to me (more students
might have finished and submitted to Mrs. T, but I’m not sure since I can’t access Schoology
assignment submissions), which is more than half the class! On top of that, a good majority of
the students responded to the exit ticket (which became the bellringer on Thursday) discussion
board with some great answers! It definitely seemed like they understood how inventions such
as the cotton gin, steamboat, etc. worked and impacted life in America.

In all, they were really responsive and engaged the whole time. There were a few moments
where I had to repeat the instructions for confused students or demonstrate how to edit the
slideshow for them, but I’m glad they were willing to ask me for help at all. Like Mrs. T said in her
evaluation of my lesson, giving the students “time checks” also sort of helped us stay on track!

After Teaching:
● What did you learn from teaching this lesson that you will use in future lessons?
● To what degree do you feel that this lesson was a success? What evidence do you have for the
success of the lesson? (Hint: Student learning is the key to a lesson’s success!)
● How did the time spent preparing for your lesson contribute to its success?
● If you could do this lesson again with the same students, would you do anything differently? what?
● Any last comments/reflections about your lesson?
If I could do this lesson again with the same students, or really any set of students, I’d want to
be a bit more direct and clear with my instructions. In an attempt to make sure everyone
understood the instructions, I think I kind of over explained them and maybe confused students
a bit more. There were a few students who didn’t exactly follow directions and ended up doing
their assignments on completely different inventions from the options I presented them with,
and I can’t help but wonder if that had to do with my instructions being unclear. I also think, if I
could redo this lesson, I’d like to give the students a “read-along” option regarding the
information sheets in case they had a hard time understanding the information in the way it
was presented or in case listening and reading along would have just been easier in general for
them. Mrs. T gave me feedback on both of these points, and I completely agree with her. It’s an
area I need to work on!

Other than that, I think the lesson was mostly successful! By the end of the lesson, most all of
the students had met the learning target and were able to explain how the inventions they
learned about impacted American industries and life in general. Giving students a sort of limited
set of information to pull from (rather than risk them getting lost in other sources or finding
illegitimate information) was helpful, I think, and it’s something I would want to try in future
lessons. Also, letting them respond to the bellringers “open notes” seemed to help them a lot,
too! I mean, I myself have to double and triple check everything, so I’m not expecting kids who
are younger than me to have any better of a memory. Open notes on everything, from small
bellringers/exit tickets to test, is the best idea to me, and it’s something I’ll want to implement in
the future.

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