Tina Macabitas

Lesson #4 Reflection Tina Macabitas University of La Verne Fall 2013

Tina Macabitas For my fourth lesson plan, I chose to teach a life science lesson about plant parts. My instructional objective was to have students be able to know that many plants have roots, stems,

leaves, and flowers. They will be able to describe what these different parts do for the plant. This lesson will segue into a thematic unit on pumpkins that is appropriate for the fall season and upcoming holiday, Halloween. I plan on designing my future lesson plans to go cross curriculum by measuring pumpkins and sorting seeds for mathematics, doing the anatomy and life cycle of a pumpkin for science and art, and a writing assignment for language arts. In this lesson, I continued to use the BBDI (Brain Based Direct Instruction) method that is used by the Saugus Union School District. My past few lesson plans have been procedural and I wanted to attempt to design a lesson plan that was declarative according to the BBDI method. In a declarative lesson plan you define the most important information that they are going to have to know. In this science lesson it is identifying plant parts. More specifically, the flower, stem, leaves, and roots. The BBDI frameworks states that I need to control the chunks by considering how much information can my age group handle in working memory. For the students in Mrs. Whites class, the control time of how long these students can pay attention are 5-8 minutes. Thus, my Into began with realia. I strategically planned this before lunch to control the chunks of time. The students were able to touch and feel a real plant with flowers, stems, leaves, roots, and even soil which activated prior knowledge and engaged students in active learning. I also took pictures of the students while they touched the realia. Next, I incorporated these pictures into my power point presentation while on my lunch break. When the students returned from lunch, I continued my lesson plan with a YouTube video as a hook or attention grabber. In reflection, I began the video abruptly and rather quickly without any verbal introduction or description of what was occurring. It is important to begin

Tina Macabitas with an introduction or reminder of the learning objective. After the video, I wanted to continue to engage the students through the use of realia by using a power point presentation that I put

together. The students were engaged and excited to see pictures of each other holding the plants. It was an effective technique of engaging them in the lesson. I continued with modeling the parts of the plant on the white board and moved into guided practice by completing a plant flipbook activity. After thoughtful consideration and a few extra days to reflect, I feel I had the most trouble during guided practice of this lesson. Many factors attributed to this realization. The students were out of sorts because it was late in the school day and they were accustomed to doing math at this time. Also, there were too many adults in the class and when the specialists came into to take their students it became chaotic because the aides and students were not ready. As the behaviors of individual students escalated so did the noise level and anxiety of the students and adults. It was difficult to continue with gradual release when the aides proceeded to motor the students through the project without waiting and listening to direction from the teacher. At that point, I felt I needed to wrap up the lesson by restating the learning objectives and move on to small groups. In all honesty, I needed to take a few days to clear my head to effectively reflect upon this lesson. It was overwhelming and there were many issues that I needed to address. In order to thoroughly and thoughtfully consider what had happened, it was helpful to debrief with my support teacher, professor, and master teacher. One issue that we were all in agreement with is that there needed to be a more efficient system of the specialist coming in and retrieving their students without disrupting the entire class. It did take a few days to sink in, but my master teacher was able to resolve this issue by designing a chart located on the back of the door for the

Tina Macabitas specialist to use when taking their students. She also organized a chart consisting of the students, specialists, and times of when they need to be taken. She displayed it in the classroom for the aides to refer to and assist with the process. In addition, my master teacher scheduled a meeting for all the specialists including the behaviorist and program specialist to collaborate and touch base. I am looking forward to this meeting and have been able to put this experience into perspective. Basically, it has been a learning experience for me when I have my own classroom. In the future as an education specialist, I will make an effort to collaborate and communicate with my colleagues and team in the beginning and periodically

during the year to avoid any of these issues that may hinder my ability to effectively manage my classroom.