Reflections on Week 5 Reading and Discussions

This week's reading focused on planning and carrying out effective lessons.  In order to plan effective instruction, teachers should incorporate direct instruction and small group discussions into their lessons. Direct instruction is more teacher-focused; the teacher gives information to the class that they will need in order to learn the focus standards for the lesson.  Direct instruction should include opportunity for students to participate, such as teacher questioning.  Teachers should be sure to give examples for every concept that they teach, in order to make the information relevant to their students. Variety in direct instruction keeps the students' attention, which is important in making sure students learn.  Independent practice is especially important for students who are learning skills, like how to work out a math problem, or identifying parts of speech.

In my classes, I teach my opening lessons using a direct-instruction approach.  Since I teach history and government, a lot of the information my students need comes from my lectures.  I use learning probes to make sure my students understand what I am teaching them--sometimes in the form of direct questioning, sometimes through finishing a KWL chart that they began before I presented the material, and sometimes through short quizzes at the end of the class.  I really like to use small-group discussion sessions, because I find that some students open up more freely in a small group, and discussing historical events with their peers leads them to understand the events better.  As some classmates and I talked about in our discussions this week, peer explanations are usually easier to understand than teacher explanations.

I think it's really important to teach history in relation to what is happening in the world today.  I try to incorporate current events whenever I can so that students can see that history actually does repeat itself. For example, wars are usually fought over religion or money, and these age-old concepts can be taught in relation to the conflicts in the Middle East today.  This allows students to see that history is relevant; the lessons we as a people don't learn from our past are doomed to be repeated.

I found it interesting to read what my classmates said about preparation and participation this week.  Even teachers of the youngest grades agreed that participation increases in small-group work, even though we ask questions of our students all during lecture sessions.  I would have thought that younger students would be eager to discuss what they know more openly than my high school students (who are so worried about what other people think), but I guess that's not true.  I also found that my classmates agreed that the preparation for delivering a small-group discussion lesson is a little lower than preparation for a lecture, at least with regards to the topic information.  Preparation for small-groups or one-on-one lessons involves more logistics--how I group my students, which objectives I want them to master, how they show their work.  As my preparation decreases, the preparation and participation that the students have to show increases.