Reflection & Self-Analysis

Whole Class:
My showcase lesson was in the subject of science. This lesson discusses magnetism and the
properties of magnetic objects. Up to the point of teaching my lesson, students had experienced and
were familiar with the north and south poles of a magnet. This lesson provided the students with
magnetism vocabulary and hands-on experimenting. I started the lesson by asking the students what
they knew about magnets. By asking this question, I was able to listen to their answers. This allowed me
to get feedback on their knowledge of the content. Standing in front of the class, I introduced and
discussed important vocabulary words. I introduced one word at a time while writing it on the board for
the students to copy in their science notebooks. Two of the important words were repulsion and
attraction. After introducing and discussing these words, I demonstrated these to the class. I was able to
give the students a visual by using a pencil and three donut magnets. I started off by putting one magnet
on the pencil. I added another magnet and made sure that opposite poles were together, this showed
the students the concept of attraction. I then added the other magnet, making sure the same poles
were together; this showed the students the concept of repulsion. The students enjoyed seeing the
magnets bouncing off one another. This was a great visual demonstration in my lesson.
After introducing magnetism, I let the students explore. Students were given a bag of objects. In
the bag, some objects were magnetic and others were not. First, students were to predict whether or
not they thought the object would be magnetic or non-magnetic and record it on their table handout.
This took longer than I expected. Students struggled naming all the objects and this took up too much
time. I should have had each object in the bag labeled with a number. On the handout, the object and its
corresponding number should have been already listed and given to the students. With the chart being
prepared prior to the lesson, it would promote the students to have a greater amount of time to
experiment with the objects. This would allow them to go through the objects more easily to make their
predictions rather than spending time to find a name for each object. After their predictions were
complete, students were divided into groups and given donut magnets. I made sure that I handed out
the donut magnets after the students had made their predictions. Students would have been tempted
to play with the magnets. I walked around to make sure students were sharing the magnets and working
as a group. This hands-on activity allowed the students to explore magnetism. After the groups were
done testing, students were to only observe the objects that were magnetic. I told the students to look
at these objects and discuss within their group the similarities these objects may have. The groups
shared their observations about the magnetic objects to the class. Running short on time, I was not able
to fully explain the similarities these objects have in common. I should have had better explanations as
to what all these objects contain that make them magnetic and why an object can be non-magnetic.
Overall, I feel this lesson was successful in teaching the students properties of magnets. Eight
students out of the sixteen, that were present, had a gain from their pre to post assessments. Only four
students out of sixteen had a loss from their pre to post assessments.

Individual Students:
Student number 1 was chosen as my high achiever. This student is a high achiever in all subjects.
This students is success may come from his hard work and focus in the classroom. He is never the
student you have to ask for his attention. If he is given any spare time in class he is always reading.
Although he missed questions on his assessments, he had the greatest gain from pre to post-assessment
in the whole class.
I chose student 21 as my average achiever. This student had a plus one gain from his pre to post
assessments. Plus one gain was very common among the class. However, this student is very selfmotivating and gets excited about learning. Although he is hard working and works well with others, he
is very talkative. He lacks focus in the classroom and this could be a possibility for his lack of success. He
is hard working and works well with others. He will occasionally ask questions but works hard to find the
answer by himself, first. He has average grades throughout all subject areas.
I chose student number 10 as my low achiever. The time I spent with the class, I started to
notice his lack of focus. When walking around the classroom there were many times I had to get him to
refocus on his work. He does not try his hardest and is very lazy. I caught him several times looking on
his neighbors paper because he did not want to do the work for himself. I feel he doesnt fulfill his full
potential in any subject area.

Reflection on additional lessons

Lesson 2: I taught my first lesson with a small group in the subject area of science. This lesson was called
schoolyard safari. The students used skills such as; observing, concluding and interpreting signs of
animals in their own school playground. First, I engaged the students with questions about animals and
their habitat. I asked students what a habitat was and what a habitat provides for an animal. I asked
students if they had ever heard of the word safari. This was a successful engaging technique that got
the students thinking of what we were going to do next. The students were familiar with this word. I let
the students know that we would be going on a safari in their playground area. The students were to
look and listen for signs of animals living for visiting the area. I made sure to set guidelines for outside.
Students were to search carefully and quietly for animals. The students were actively involved. They
showed motivation and excitement when looking for signs of animals on the playground. After
observing for several minutes, I brought the students back together. The students compared and shared
their observations. I wrapped up the lesson by asking students what the importance of a habitat was to
an animal. Students wrote their responses on the back of their survey sheets. Overall, this lesson was
successful. We were able to find and observe an old birds nest. However, this lesson was not grade level
appropriate. In future lessons, I can make sure that all lessons are grade level appropriate and match the
appropriate grade level standard.
Lesson 3: I taught a reading lesson in a small group. I choose to do a small group because I wanted to
specifically target the lower level reading group. These groups had already been divided up by my

cooperating teacher depending on the students reading abilities. This lesson was a review lesson.
Students learned an underlining strategy to identify key ideas and details in a text as they read the
passage. I decided to do this lesson to also help with the students reading comprehension. I worked
with the students on a passage first. This passage had questions along with it. I described to them that it
is important to read the questions first. After the students read the questions and got an idea of what to
look for in the passage, we read the passage together as a group. While reading I told the students to
stop me if we came across anything they thought was important to helping us answer the questions.
Anything the students thought was important we would stop and underline it. After reading the
passage, we went through the questions together. We only looked at the ideas we had underlined to
answer the questions. After completing this passage, I handed the students another passage to read.
This passage was read independently and questions followed this passage as well. Students were to read
the questions first and use underlining for key ideas in the passage. While the students worked I
observed their techniques for answering the questions. All the students in the small group of five,
except one, seemed to understand the concept. The one student seemed lost and just wanted to look
over at his classmates paper for the answers. I made sure to give frequent eye contact to keep him on
task. After students had completed the questions, I took their answers up for review. All the students
did great underlining key ideas in the passage and their correct answers showed for it. In future lessons,
I can connect my passages to something we may be learning in class. For example, if students were
learning about magnets, it would be appropriate for me to choose a passage that is about magnets. This
can help engage the students in their reading because it is something that we have talked about in class.
Lesson 4: I taught my fourth lesson in the subject area of math. The lesson taught the kids that not all
patterns contain numbers. I started off the lesson by asking the students questions. I asked the students
what they thought nonnumeric meant and I got many different answers. When I explained to the
students that non meant not, I feel that I saw light bulbs come on. This really helped the students
understand the meaning of nonnumeric especially since the students have been studying prefixes in
class. I explained to them that nonnumeric patterns can be shown using colors, shapes, objects or
pictures. I explained to them that there are repeating patterns and growing patterns. I used connecting
cubes to give the students a visual on the difference between a growing and repeating pattern. After
creating a pattern with the connecting cubes, I asked the students what would come next in the pattern.
The connecting cubes were an excellent material used in my lesson to show the students a visual of the
different pattern types. After introducing the vocabulary to my lesson, students were divided into
groups. Students worked in groups of three to create a growing or repeating pattern using the
connecting cubes. The students were given 50 cubes in three different colors. When the students began
to work on the patterns they had a lot of questions and seemed confused. After creating their pattern,
the groups explained their patterns to the class. Group members had to describe the type of pattern
they created, show the pattern unit, and ask the class what would come next in their pattern. Some
groups made more than one pattern when I had told them to only make one per group. If I were to
teach this lesson again, I would make sure to have my requirements for the group work listed on the
smart board. This would limit the questions and the confusion among the students.

Lesson 5: I taught my last lesson on estimating products. Students were taught to estimate products by
rounding. After finding the estimated product, students compared the estimated product to the actual
product by using greater than or less than. I introduced vocabulary words to the students and wrote
them on the board. I taught the students a song that I had learned in school. I am hoping this song will
stick with them like it did me. This song is a great tool and can be used in their future classes to estimate
decimals as well. We worked several word problems together on the smart board. I always made sure to
ask the students what my next step should be in solving the problem. This ensured that the students
were active in my lesson and werent just watching me complete it for them.
I then taught the students the second part of the lesson. This time I would give the students a
problem with a variable in it. The student would then have to work backwards to find what the missing
variable was. Looking back at this lesson, I feel this was too much for the students to take in. I should
have divided the lessons into two days. This would allow the students to learn the first lesson and have
time to absorb it and work problems for homework. The next day I would have introduced how to work
backwards when given a problem with a variable in it.
Reflection on possibilities on professional development
From my first lesson to my last lesson, I feel I have improved a great amount. Although there
was improvement, I still have professional development goals to be set. My first goal would be to
manage my time while teaching my lessons. I found myself just teaching and hoping that I would have
enough time to complete it all. Instead, I need to set time ranges for each procedure so I am not
spending too much time on any one procedure.. I would go through my lesson spending as much time as
I needed and when I got to the end of my lesson I would find that I was short on time. The students
would end up not having enough time to complete their assessment or independent practice for that
lesson before moving on to the next subject. To help meet this goal, I can time myself throughout my
lesson to guarantee myself I am on the right pace.
My second professional development goal is to have more confidence when teaching the
students. Although I have developed more confidence from my first to my last lesson, I still feel there
can be more improvement. I need to be more confident with the material I am teaching the students. I
can do this by improving my knowledge in the subject I will be teaching. My worst fear is to teach the
students something that is incorrect. I also can improve on my confidence with disciplining the students.
Sometimes I feel that I am not in the right place to tell them to be quiet or give them consequences for
their actions. This is something I can improve on by not lacking authority with the students. Students
need to know that I can also give them discipline for their actions.