Ashley - Lesson Reflection

After teaching a lesson on opinion statements, I have realized that the students need a lot of guidance in their writing practices. Most of the students really struggle in coming up with their own ideas and topics, and putting their thoughts or feelings into words. Since the students are very dependent on the teachers’ help, I had to teach the lesson to the whole class and give them guidance as a whole class. I did this through providing sentence starters for the opinion statements. The objective of creating a thesis statement was achieved, but after much guidance and help. My planned mini-lesson on opinion statements turned into a step-by-step whole class instruction. This was very useful and helpful for the students, but it was much more time consuming and intensive than what I had planned.

I plan to re-teach the material to students who need additional support and students that were absent tomorrow through extensive one-on-one help. After my mini-lesson tomorrow, I will call students to the back table for a conference to help them further develop their opinion statements, or thesis sentences. I will re-teach the lesson from today and I will be able to answer their personal questions and work with them in a small group setting, rather than in a large, whole class group. There is also an instructional aid that comes in during writing time 2 times a week that I will utilize to work with students that seem to be struggling or needing extra help.

If I were to teach this lesson again, I would change a few things to make the lesson go smoother and to help the students better understand what I was asking of them. I would provide many more models and examples for the students to see what exactly I was asking from them. I would also provide a more detailed mini-lesson for the students because I feel that my mini-lesson was not extensive enough for the students to know what I was asking. I feel that if the students had more guidance and examples to follow, they would have been much more comfortable with this writing.

Thus far, I have learned a lot about the students’ writing that will help me develop my lesson plans for the next three weeks. There is a wide variety of skill level in regards to writing in my classroom, and there are also a lot of different attitudes toward writing. I have a lot of students in my class that really struggle with writing because they are not independent writers and could not generate ideas and topics on their own. This was difficult for me because I found it very hard to be able to address all students’ needs and questions because I was spending a lot of time working with particular students that needed this help. To fix this problem, I will be sure to utilize my MT and the instructional aid to work with the students that need more help, while I work with the rest of the class. Another struggle I had with this lesson is that a lot of the students had never heard certain vocabulary words that I used while teaching. I was unable to teach my lessons as planned because I had to teach them basic vocabulary of writing. I think that this was because this is the students’ first year writing in English, so they had learned all of the writing vocabulary and ideas in Spanish prior to this year. From this lesson, I have learned that I need to explain everything very thoroughly and will also need to provide a lot of modeling and examples for my students to be successful and for them to understand the concepts.