Rachel Cummins

Lesson Study Reflection

For our lesson, we did a main idea tree lesson with our students. We had

different types of biographies about different African Americans during the Civil

Rights Movement from a book called, Portraits of African-American Heroes by Tonya

Bolden. After the students read their chosen biography they were to create a main

idea tree with their group and then individually they had to write a short summary

from the points they made from their main idea tree. Kathryn and I both agree that

we think this lesson went smoothly.

This was the first time that I had implemented a reading lesson plan in the

classroom before. It was very new and I learned a lot from it. One thing that I

noticed when we had the students split off into their groups was that there were

some students who understood some of the vocabulary in the informational texts

and others who did not. A lot of the students were on different reading levels so

some could comprehend more than others. If we had to change something I think I

would look through the texts and see what words were frequently used and then go

over those vocabulary words with the students together. This way they were

introduced to the words and then had more of an explanation of them instead of

having no idea what they meant. Another way to help this, is create the groups

beforehand. When creating the groups beforehand we could match students

together who were at the different reading levels so they could help each other out

with reading and vocabulary words. When we let the students have choice in

making their own groups and picking their biography, some groups had more lower

leveled readers together so they struggled a little more than others. To help these

groups along Kathryn and I would go and help them with their reading and

understanding. When we saw that the students were getting it, we turned them lose
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to work on the next page or paragraph and then checked back in with them a few

minutes later.

Two other things I noticed that go hand in hand when dealing with reading

comprehension is that our group of students was that some of them struggled with

inferring and background knowledge. Inferring is not something that we had

considered that the students would have known or not known how to do when we

thought about our lesson. With some of the information texts, there was some

inferring that you had to do to figure out some of the key details. For example, in

the Fredrick Douglass article we read aloud talked about how he worked long days

and didnt have enough food. Some students might not have known about events

that happened in this time-period. They might not have known that there was

slavery and what slavery was. If they did not know this then they could not have put

slavery as a main idea branch with that statement as the key details. We have been

learning that background knowledge is an important aspect when dealing with

reading comprehension. I noticed this with some of our students when they were

completing the group work. When I would go around to the different groups, they

had questions about specific things mentioned in their articles that they did not

know about. For example, some students were not sure about judges and their jobs

when reading about Thurgood Marshall. As a teacher, you need to be aware of ideas

and experiences students come in your classroom with that they can relate to and

apply in the classroom. If students do not know much about a specific topic or

subject than their comprehension and inferencing will need some extra support.

Since this was the first time that we taught a reading lesson to students,

there were many learning aspects from a teaching standpoint. One big takeaway

that I learned was that when teaching children and walking through a lesson, you
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need to be very specific when giving directions. For the I Do section, it was super

important for us to really walk through with the students every little detail. The

most important was saying our thoughts out loud so that we could model it for the

students. As a teacher you need to model for your students so they know what is

expected of them and how they need to work through the process. When we were

teaching we had to walk through how we were thinking about finding the main idea

by showing them how to infer and summarize the page/paragraph in a word or

phrase. Modeling for the students helped them then do it themselves when we let

them go to complete their own main idea tree.

Overall, I think this was a great activity and assignment that we had to

implement in our classroom. For this specific activity, we were sure to think about

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. For our lesson we incorporated two aspects from the

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy; academic rigor and critical consciousness. Academic

Rigor is supporting your students learning through high academic expectations. In

this activity we let our students know that we had very high expectations for them

and that we knew they would be able to complete the activity even though it was

challenging. Critical Consciousness is the development of sociopolitical

consciousness allowing students to critique the cultural norms, values and

institutions that produce and maintain inequities. We made a point to talk about

why they think that Black History is only celebrated for a month and not more. We

talked about how we could make improvements on this and we related it back to

peoples lived experiences and cultures.