Reflections on Teach 2 Things to do again round 3. My Teach 2 with Thomas felt much better than my Teach 1.

. Now hopefully Teach 3 will be even better. One of the things that made our lesson a success was having a real lab experiment/challenge. The students responded really well to the lab. Almost everyone was engaged most of the time and they seemed to be enjoying themselves. This was different from my first design/teach where the activity involved drawing the electron shells of atoms. In that lesson the students were not manipulating actual materials (which would have been hard to design based on the content). One of the biggest things I took away from my Teach 2 was the importance of having students do hands-on investigations with actual stuff. There are several other things I would repeat in terms of design. One would be the use of a discrepant event. The students were clearly impressed with our demonstration of the supersaturated sodium acetate crystalizing. We showed this near the start of class which was a good time to do it. We did not tie this demonstration into our lesson until near the end but I still think it was good to show it near the beginning. It probably would have been best if we had been able to design our lesson in such a way that the discrepant event led directly into a student investigation. This was not really possible with our Teach 2 lesson and I still think it was better to show the discrepant event near the beginning rather than at the end when we explained supersaturated solutions. Showing the crystallization at the beginning also allowed us to show it again at the end. Our worksheet and anticipation guide also seemed successful (although I still struggle with the idea of incorporating formative assessment into a single lesson). A worksheet for every student is key although it does use a lot of paper. I think the important thing with this is to make sure every work sheet truly helps students understand and figure things out. Having a worksheet double as an exit ticket may also be a good idea. In our Teach 2 lesson we had extra demonstrations and concepts to go over if we had extra time. We did not end up having much extra time but I think it was important to have this extra stuff up our sleeves. In terms of lesson delivery, there are a few things I would make sure to do again. One is make random groups of students. I observed that certain students sat together at lab tables in Sues class and I felt that this caused a lot of problems. The kids who goofed off and seemed less engaged often sat together and did not motivate each other. I will look out for this in other classes. In my own classes I would like to assign groups randomly but also allow for some consistency with partners. Certain pairings or groups could last for the duration of a project or unit, just the way we do it in Problem Solving Science. With my speaking delivery I feel that my confidence is improving; however, I still have a ways to go in terms of applying productive questions and reflective discourse. Things to do differently next time There are several design elements of my Teach 2 that I would change in future lessons. One thing I would do differently would be to narrow the scope of the lesson and cover less content. I would also try to do more with fewer materials. Sue told us that our lesson did use more materials than she usually uses even though we cut our supplies significantly from what we initially planned. This is a fine balance because I also believe it is crucial for each student to have plenty of exposure to the materials. The less

materials students have to investigate, the harder I think it is as a teacher to put the lesson between you and your students. We designed the experiment in our Teach 2 lesson to be fairly heuristic. The students had to measure how much of each substance dissolved but we did not tell them how to figure this out. I believe this was a good approach but it did mean that most of the groups added all of the solute at once. This made it impossible to get an accurate measure of the amounts dissolved. Next time I design a lesson with this kind of situation I plan to build in time for the students to outline what they will do before the do it. During the experiment I was running around saying, Now before you dump all of that in, think about what you are trying to do. Having the students think it out on paper first would increase productivity of results and allow more time for checking in with each group. Getting students to actually talk and think through their process might be difficult but perhaps they could answer a couple of questions on a worksheet before getting their materials. It would also help to include a transitional activities such as showing the materials to the class and requiring a certain number of questions before starting. Another thing I would like to try differently is using concept mapping in the place of an anticipation guide. Designing a concept map activity would probably take less time than designing an anticipation guide. Concept mapping might also be a better tool for formative assessment. I would like to feel that I am actually using formative assessment in my future lessons. I think it is hard to do this in a 90 minute class but it is something to work at either with anticipation guides or other methods.