Week 3

Wondering: How does the actual planning of the lesson help with teaching rather than teaching from an already planned lesson affect teaching?

    This week my co-teaching partner and I planned and taught our first Pathwise Lesson. The lesson was on summarizing a story. We first sat down with our mentor teacher as she gave us ideas for the lesson and it took off from there. We decided on using a graphic organizer from Pinterest that involved the activity of "Someone, Wanted, But, So, Then". My co-teaching partner and I took the time to plan out the lesson together. This helped us visualize what the lesson would actually look like. We decided to use the book Pierre the Penguin. 
   Today was the day we actually taught the lesson. Since we wrote down the steps that we were going to go through during the teaching process, we felt confident in the outcome of the lesson. The students seemed engaged in the book and were able to answer the questions about what the most import details of the story were. Once we finished the "we do" part of the gradual release and responsibility model we sent the students off to the "I do" part. Most students did this step amazingly, however there were a few students we did have to assist. One student even point out that the graphic organizer practically laid out the summary for you. We had her read her summary to the class and point out/teach this observation she came across to the rest of the class. This is what I would consider "high quality assessments" according to Tomlinson and Imbeau. They say that "high quality assessments should guide students in understanding essential learning outcomes, their status relative to those outcomes, and ways in which they can work effectively to maximize their growth toward and beyond those outcomes." That student understood the whole idea of the organizer and how to apply it to a book, as well as teaching the class about what she had observed. Overall, I think our lesson went even better than expected and I felt well prepared with us actually doing the planning of the lesson. Wondering: Can the students tell the difference in teaching style when a teacher has not actually planned the lesson (It is planned by someone else) he/she is teaching?

Link to the Graphic Organizer for Summarizing: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bz_lKYUlDu4TOTVjNDhiMDAtNWY1Mi00ODg0LWE3YzEtZGIxZmEzNzdhZTdm/edit?hl=en_US