As part of my Educ 350: Teaching and Learning course at Trinity College in Spring 2023, I designed and taught three inquiry-based science lessons for Grade 4 students at Expeditionary Learning Academy at Moylan School (ELAMS) in Hartford, CT.
When I began this semester, I had tutored students and taught alongside other teachers, but this was my first time actually writing and teaching my own lessons alone. I wasn’t really sure what work went into lesson plans and their execution, but I did my best to learn along the way, and I’ve improved drastically over the course of the three lessons in finding ways to build thinking classrooms through areas such as writing objectives that led to the right amount of content for a class, capturing learning in assessments, and challenging inequity in the classroom.
My first lesson, Ecosystem Exploration, was focused on the flow of energy in different ecosystems, which I explored through the food chain. I had students group up and look at different biomes, putting together food chains for their assigned environment and thinking about the consequences of removing one organism or another. I had difficulties coming up with proper objectives, and I was overambitious in the content I wanted to cover; I had originally planned to also talk about how humans affect energy flow by introducing concepts of human intervention (deforestation, oil drilling, hunting, etc.), but when I began teaching, it quickly became apparent that I was not going to be able to cover all the different points of my objectives. We only got through about half of the activities I had planned for the lesson, which also left me at a loss for my assessment. I had expected to be able to take pictures of student work and have students explain to me how they put together their food chains and what happened when they took out an organism. However, most groups were hardly able to put together a food chain at all, and without getting past that first step, I couldn’t ask the questions I wanted to use to help me assess my students’ learning. I was able to use a bit of reconstructed dialogue, and I had a few pictures of student work, but it was hard to use the minimal results I had gathered to actually see and emphasize evidence of thinking and learning. It didn’t help that some of the students didn’t even know how to go about the activities because of language barriers—though I knew ahead of time that three students spoke mainly Spanish or Portuguese and little English, I thought that since my lesson had lots of pictures and visuals, it wouldn’t be a problem. But these students didn’t understand what to do with the visuals, which put them at an unfair disadvantage.
For the second lesson, Water Cycle Wonder, I had students look at the water cycle and how water moves through the atmosphere. I had them draw diagrams to see how water flowed through the cycle, and then they used their diagrams to put together bracelets that represented the cycle. I also led an experiment to show evaporation, since the state standard I had been given by the classroom teacher was more specifically focused on the sun’s role in the water cycle. I made an attempt to address the language differences by bringing Spanish materials alongside the English ones. I figured that Spanish would be close enough to Portuguese that the Portuguese-speaking students could use it as well, but that was an incorrect assumption, and to add onto this, I discovered after handing out the written materials that many of the English-speakers couldn’t read or had a lower reading proficiency. This limited the amount of the activities we were able to complete, so even though I had decreased the amount of content the lesson was attempting to cover in its forty-minute span, the activities still weren’t completed to the extent I had expected. My objective was not as high-level as I’d wanted, but this did allow for more students to meet it despite not understanding the activities very thoroughly. I had a better understanding of what the students could accomplish, but I was still struggling to reach all students with my lesson since they had such a variety of needs and had different levels of prior knowledge. Since everyone was able to do at least part of the activities, though, I had a better form of assessment. I relied more heavily on use of my video footage (which had been mostly useless the first time around due to distance from the microphone and students going up to the camera when they weren’t asked to do so), and I captured a helpful amount of student explanation and progression through the camera. I was still able to utilize some reconstructed dialogue to fill in the gaps, and between that and the videos, I had a nice array of evidence from which I could observe learning taking place, but there was very little evidence of thinking happening. Some students were understanding the concepts of the lesson, but many of them were relying on mimicry and focusing more on doing the assignment than doing it correctly and understanding what it meant.
The last lesson, Eggciting Eggsperiment, was a lesson on forces and motion, and I designed an egg drop experiment to get students to think about the effects of gravity and how to reduce them. This time, I prepared the lesson to be taught with no written materials so reading level would not be a hindrance, and I came ready with key words related to the lesson in Spanish and Portuguese in case I needed to communicate more verbally about the activity with the students who spoke these languages. I had a higher-level thinking objective and a single, solid activity to cover the content of the lesson. This lesson was taught to a much smaller group of students than the first two, but luckily my lesson plan worked well for a small group even though it was planned with the bigger class in mind. The smaller group also allowed for a greater use of the video footage in my assessments because I was able to more thoroughly capture the progress of the students throughout the lesson. I didn’t need to rely on reconstructed dialogue since almost every part of the lesson was caught and audible on the video, which allowed for me to carefully assess my students’ learning. I had planned out assessment questions to better assist this part of my teaching, but I didn’t do a great job of integrating the questions into the actual teaching of the lesson. Even so, I was able to see learning happening as the students worked on their projects and tested them out, and I was finally able to see the thinking happening. The students were visibly thinking about how to manipulate the materials based on the effect of gravity, which was the goal of my lesson. When something in their designs didn’t work, they were thinking about why it didn’t work and how to fix it. If I’d asked the right questions, that would’ve been captured better too, but that’s something that I can work on improving in the future.
In summary, I was able to improve from lesson to lesson, writing more appropriate objectives and learning activities to maximize learning and thinking in my classroom, I more effectively addressed inequity with each lesson I taught in order to create a classroom where all students could participate in the learning and thinking, and I more effectively captured evidence of that learning and thinking with my lessons. As my students were learning, I was learning alongside them, and I have skills that have gotten better over the course of the semester as well as skills that I can continue to develop throughout my teaching career.