Class #25: Tuesday May, 1 2018

Conclusions Lesson Draft
Conclusions Lesson Plan Draft
Conclusions Handout Version 1


Conclusions Lesson

Conclusions Lesson PowerPoint

Conclusions Lesson Handout

Conclusions Lesson Plan

I think this lesson went well mostly because I planned well in the notes section of my PowerPoint. I made it a point to have an extra anecdotal comment or question for the students on every slide. I think my resistance to just delivering information in presentation format made me more effective at using PowerPoint. I think my most effective ways of riffing off the slides were when I asked the students to answer questions amongst themselves. Answering questions as pairs or ranking themselves on their fingers broke up the discussion and helped them get a sense of what other people were thinking in the room, which is frequently lost during a presentation of new material. I also think the very structured way I asked students to take notes kept the engages.

I think the student engagement was high during this lesson. I also think that my lesson planning to contributed to this. When I planned my lesson I really did research into how to write an effective conclusion and curated what I thought was the best of the best from these sources. I think the students respected that I legitimately studied this concept and could tell I was giving them tips I felt were genuinely helpful. I think this also positively impacted my lesson delivery because it made me seem very authentic and conversational when I shared the new information. For me, doing an effective presentation has always been something I considered challenging because I prefer to teach through conversation. This lesson allowed me to infuse conversation into a presentation and I think it was a great strategy for me. I think I will use PowerPoints much more frequently in the future, especially in combination with graphic organizers or guided notes.


Professor Gleason's Comments with my responses in blue

Laura, You did wonderful work presenting the PPT slides yesterday. You read the points out loud clearly and we could all follow along with you. Thank you. I could feel it was a good lesson, which is always a great feeling. I  felt like I was learning something new or at least learning about conclusions in a new way  while I was listening to you speak. I think this is because I legitimately learned new things and did research for my lesson. It seemed like I was sharing something new because I was. I am hoping to continue my research in composition continuously so I can keep curating my favorite tips to share with my students. Next semester, I would strongly encourage you to use PPT slides to present a lesson on the day that you are observed for evaluation of your teaching. The PPT slides will help you organize your thoughts in advance and they will help you keep to a script. It really does seem to help me a lot. I think this might actually be how I begin every class, with a quick lesson on craft or conventions guided by a PowerPoint. I think I'll plan to make them super short though, so I can repeatedly spiral and cover different parts of composition from different perspectives. 

You were also very welcoming of all the students' comments and that made the students feel that their contributions were appreciated and affirmed by their teacher. I think I would like to work on this even more. I worked in a school that did a lot of work with accountable talk and actively synthesizing and adding on in discussions. I would like to model this for my students in class, so they can do it in discussions too. 

There were three areas where improvement is needed: 

1. Because of the partition in the room and because of noise in the hallway that spills into the classroom, the sound of human voices doesn't always carry well, and women's voices are harder to hear than men's. So there were some student comments that I could not hear. It is possible that students also did not hear all the student comments -- in part because they are not paying attention all the time and in part because of the acoustics in the room. To counteract both problems, you can repeat each student's comment. And this gives you a chance to elaborate on the student's comment. You take what the student said, affirm it by repeating it, and then add an elaboration of your own to that student's comment. Use the student's comment to say something more. This is one form that scaffolding can take. Great point. I always feel hesitant to repeat things, but that is a huge part of effective teaching. I love the idea of being able to elaborate on the comment, so it feels like I am moving the conversation forward instead of stopping to just rehash what students say. 

2. Some of the students' comments were worth following  up on with a question directed to that student. You can ask a student to say more -- to explain or provide an example. I think that I was concerned about staying on one point for too long. In the future, I think I will make my craft lessons shorter so that I can take more time to ask higher order questions to the students. 

3. It was not just difficult for me to answer your question about those three conclusions. Without seeing the whole essay, I could not answer the questions asked. I think what made this hard is there wasn't necessarily a "right" answer. I have found that students find this really frustrating when it's a workshop on applying a new skill. I think this would have worked better as an open-ended question response where they could pick a conclusion and interpret the strategies they saw in it so that it was their own original observation rather than something they were trying to answer "correctly". 

I would like to see you write something about this lesson on your blog and post your lesson materials there as well. 

All best, Barbara

Barbara's Introductions Handout