This week I has the privilege of being able to contribute to a synchronous co-teach. I was responsible for taking the lead in the beginning of the lesson to ask the essential question, give instructions for writing in the science journal, the turn and talk, and the whole class discussion. All of this was a warm up to the lesson. This particular day’s Science lesson was about the human body organs and their function. The purpose of the first day was to introduce the unit to the students. My responsibility was basically to informally assess the student’s prior knowledge before we began our instruction on the unit. I met with my CT to plan the lesson and we first decided, using the article I read for my instructional planning course (Badali & Titus), which co-teaching model we would use for the lesson. After planning and consulting with my CT, we decided that we would perform what we call a 2:2:2. This is where I introduce the essential question and give the students 2 minutes to journal their thoughts in the science journal, 2 minutes to turn and talk with their shoulder partner, and 2 minutes to have a whole class discussion. So I began by asking, what are human body organs and what do they do? I told the students that they were to take 2 minutes to write their thoughts on the essential question in their science journal. The first problem that we encountered, is that it took almost 2 minutes for the students to just write the essential question in their notebook. This led me to allowing them more time to write, which pushed our lesson back by an additional 4 minutes. The second problem we encountered, is that when asked to turn and talk, the students did not have on-topic conversations about the essential question. My CT and I drifted around the room and had to constantly re-direct groups back to the topic. The 3rd phase of the lesson however, was a success. The students really enjoyed and contributed to the whole class discussion. They were fully engaged and were asking some really wonderful questions. They were also answering each other’s questions. I was able to facilitate this conversation and my CT chimed in when needed to ask them further questions and deepen their thinking about the topic. As I do with every lesson I contribute to, I video taped my interactions with the students. After going home and reviewing the video, I decided that there were a few things that I would have liked to do differently if I had the opportunity to do it again. The overall success of the whole class discussion made me think, what if we had done this first instead of last? If I had begun with the whole class discussion, the students would have been engaged and would have had many other ideas to pull from when writing in their science journal. I believe there overall written responses would have been more thorough and well thought out after having a meaningful class discussion. I also noticed, that because I was unfamiliar with the content, that my questions during the discussion were not as rigorous as I would have liked. The teacher's resource for the science material was unavailable to me at the time, and I had only briefly glanced at it prior to the lesson. This really prohibited me from asking good question, because I did not fully understand the content requirements of the unit and which direction the instruction needed to go. After this lesson, I asked my CT to please share the teacher resource with me and make me copies of the material so that I could study them in depth for the next lesson. Having this experience really opened my eyes to the importance of thorough planning and knowing the content. I also was able to compare our attempt at synchronous teaching to the examples given in the article, and overall, I think my CT and I complimented each other well!
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