During my pre-conference is when I first noticed the benefits of the dreaded 5 page lesson plan that USF provides for us to complete prior to coaching lessons. Although my Math content coach did not require me to complete the 5 page lesson plan, although I am familiar with it from previous lessons, she asked me some questions about my lesson that were very similar to those listed on the 5 page plan. These questions, which seem much more important in the context of the conversation we were having about my plans for student learning, really caused me to stop and think about WHY I was doing things in the order I planned, but also, WHO was intended to benefit from my plan. The pre-confrence really helped me to modify my plan slightly in order to better differentiate for my students and allowed me an opportunity to ask questions about the content from an expert!
The next day was my observation, although I don;t really want to call it that because my content coach was much more of a support for me than an observer. Because of her familiarity with my plans from our pre-conference, she was able to really provide support for me, help me with questioning the students, and provided support for small groups of students while I was teaching whole group. Her providing support to my students was really where we crossed the line from observation to co-teaching, and although I was the lead, I was much more confident in my own teaching knowing that I had such awesome support. Something that I might like to change though, after watching my lesson video, would be to plan better for how much time I allow students to solve the problems I give them. Although I considered how much time they may need to solve, I did not formally write it in my plan, and found that I did not stick to my time predictions within the lesson. Although some instances I provided enough time for them to solve, there were instances in which the students did not finish solving before my timer went off. We are really trying to push our students to work on their timing, as most of them spend much more time than they should on one problem when taking their unit tests, and I think this was the reason I opted for shorter times, however, it did not prove to be beneficial for the students because they were unable to solve in time, which had quite the impact on their group conversations. Next time I plan, I intend to try to find a middle ground between how long the students currently take to solve problems, and the shortened time I provided them in this lesson. I also intent to write these times on my plan so that I can stick to them consistently throughout the lesson.
I have not yet had my post-conference for this lesson, but after watching my video, I feel that my content coach will give me some of the critiques that I gave myself. I am however interested to see if maybe she noticed anything that I didn't. Overall this was an amazing experience, and now that I have truly participated in a content coaching cycle, I am able to see the many benefits of this process.