Lesson Analysis: Key Decisions
For the most part I was able to follow my lesson plan pretty closely as I taught, however there were several times where I made changes that I had not anticipated beforehand.
Establishing Norms: Behavior
By this point in the lesson my students have earned 3 stars!
I started my lesson by spending a solid 5-6 minutes establishing norms, both behavioral and procedural. While I had not planned on spending so much time doing this, I realized as I was sitting in front of my students just how far outside of their daily routine our pull-out lesson was. I had intentionally taken a group of students who are often disengaged during class read-alouds, and I was suddenly very aware of the fact that even the most interesting, well-planned lesson might as well be thrown out the window if students don’t understand behavior and procedural expectations. So I showed my students the stars that I had brought to award them for excellent behavior, and very clearly and intentionally described of the types of excellent behavior I like to see when I work with students. I then defined what I meant by excellent behavior, and modeled each of the three components as I did so. They set a goal of earning 5 stars, and I assured them that I thought they could do it.
Establishing Norms: Procedures
The turn-and-talk anchor chart
Next, after introducing the idea of cause and effect and identifying some important vocabulary, I told them that we would be doing a turn-and-talk at some point during the story. In my original plan I was going to simply tell them to be listening for my bell as a signal to begin, match them up, and point to the anchor chart that I had introduced to them the first time we did a turn-and-talk. I decided, however, that they needed a more thorough review of the turn-and-talk procedure. They had only done a turn-and-talk once, and that was a few weeks before. So I held the anchor chart up and read through each line. I had the students pretend to turn to their partner when the bell rang the first time and turn back when it rang again. Once they were facing me again I reminded them that they would be asked to share out with the group what their partner said.
Scaffolding
Here I have filled in the cause but not the effect.
The next change that I made involved putting the cognitive workload in the hands of the students earlier on than I had planned to. Originally, I was going to follow an I Do/We Do/You Do model for identifying instances of cause and effect. I had planned, therefore, to model identifying the first instance of cause and effect without asking them to help me. When it came time to do this, however, I changed my mind and instead identified the cause myself but asked them to help me figure out the effect. I said, So Strega Nona sang a song and blew three kisses. What was the effect? Because she sang a song and blew three kisses, what happened? What was the effect? In doing so I removed some of the scaffolding provided by the I Do/We Do/ You Do model. I made this change this for two reasons. The first is that based on their answers to comprehension questions and their apparent engagement up to that point, I thought that they might have enough of an understanding of what was going on to be able to participate in identifying the effect. The second was that I could tell they were excited about having the opportunity to participate actively. For many of them this is not usually the case during class read-alouds, so I wanted to validate their excitement. In hindsight, I am not sure that this was the best choice. Two students responded to my question. The first one said “the soup was gone." I wish I had prompted him to elaborate more because it is difficult to tell from this responses whether or not he truly understood. The second student did identify the effect, saying “so it would not overflow.” It probably would have been wise for me to have stuck with my original plan and modeled the first instance of cause and effect myself. This would have allowed me to demonstrate the kind of reasoning I would then want my students to go through in order to figure out what is the cause and what is the effect. (I will discuss this decision in greater depth in 'Observations of Student Learning'.)
When it came time to identify the third and final instance of cause and effect, I chose to adjust my approach once again. This time, instead of increasing the cognitive workload for my students I ended up providing more scaffolding than I had intended to. I started by saying, Because Big Anthony did not listen, Strega Nona made him eat all the pasta. So, what was the cause here? I used wait time but only one student raised his hand, and the others started to look antsy or distracted. This student responded by stating the cause and effect of the previous example (that Big Anthony forgot to blow the three kisses and so the pot overflowed). I realized after hearing his response and noting that none of the other students had their hands raised that perhaps this question was not one that they would be able to do without some scaffolding through guiding questions. The next student offered her opinion, stating that the cause was that Big Anthony had to eat all the pasta. I followed up by asking the group whether they thought this was the cause or the effect, saying “What do you all think, was that the cause—was that why—or was that the effect—what happened?” One student responded by saying, “the effect.” I am not sure, however, if she truly understood the question or whether she could just tell from the way I asked the question that I wanted her to say ‘effect.’ I wish that I had prompted her to explain further, asking her why she thought it was the effect. Once we established the effect we worked backwards to get the cause. This seemed to be much easier as it took only one or two guiding questions from me for them to identify the cause as being “he made the pasta overflow.” (I will discuss this decision in greater depth in ‘Observations of Student Learning'.)