Dylan Ackerman

Video Reflection

For my video, I had Indi (one of the MTLDs at TFA) record my direct instruction
on a lesson on human population. This is the final lesson in my unit on carrying capacity,
population growth, and limiting factors, and incorporates these building blocks and sees
the implications for our species.
During direct instruction, I overview how humans have maintained exponential
growth for many years. I went over how human population has doubled every few
generations, with particularly quick growth since 1800 (the start of the industrial
revolution). I explain that during 3 key times, humans raised our planets carrying
capacity by changing the limiting factors present, and I had students identify which
limiting factors each era changed. Finally, I had students
One strength I have is circulating and voice. Circulation has been a strength of
mine since early on in my teaching career, and it is something that I utilize both
instructionally and management wise. Voice is an area that I had to develop more, and has
been a focus of improvement. I had a tendency early in my profession of speaking
needlessly loudly and failing to use changes in tone and voice to convey different
meanings. This video is the first I have watched in awhile, and it was good to see this
change significantly.
Students seemed to enjoy most when they were able to engage with the material
themselves. During the lesson, this included cooperative learning in partners and in
groups of four, such as rally-robin and round robin interactions between students. The

class that Indi filmed for me is particularly interested in problem solving. Giving them
opportunities to figure out the next steps in the lesson kept them engaged and made it
easier for them to understand the lesson rather than just passively writing down new
material.
As the lesson progress, I had students engaged with scenarios at high levels of
Blooms taxonomy. At first, they were tasked to simply identify when certain events
occurred and how these events influenced each other. Towarsd the end, I had them start
discussions with prompts such as if this did not occur, what would have been possible
and what evidence would let you know that the carrying capacity increased. Using
these progressions in taxonomy, I was able to push students to look at the implications of
concepts and how they apply to human population.
I try to make lessons relevant to students lives, and todays lesson fulfilled that,
although in a more indirect way. The end of my lesson had students discuss the
possibility that poor environmental management might actually lower, instead of raising,
the Earths carrying capacity for human beings. This idea, as my students noted, is a
fairly terrifying idea, and even though my students live in the developed world, which
would not be affected by these implications directly, they do use and misuse natural
resources, and began to recognize ways that they might be contributing to environmental
degradation.
In my class, Ive tried to develop a continuous theme of what is more powerful
the natural world or human beings. One of the most important ways of thinking about this
involves thinking of the ways that human beings are at once different than every other
species on Earth but still bound by natural laws. Todays lesson was a big part of that for

my class, and was made possible by combining student engagement, compelling

instruction, and ways for students to understand how the concepts explored relate to their
real lives.