08 summer - holly, kim, and katie p.
types of reactions
At the summer meeting we started out by discussing our experience of teaching this lesson study and watching the video from Katie (Pointer) and Kim’s classrooms. Holly was sick as she was supposed to start this lesson and had the sub supervise while the students did the pattern finding activity. Holly felt this lesson went poorly because of the way the lesson was implemented by the sub and the students didn’t understand what was meant by patterns. The biggest lesson Holly learned was when trying a new lesson its best to teach it yourself. Holly did share the lesson with a coworker, which she used with her kids. It went better then with Holly’s kids but still not great. Katie and Kim felt the overall flow of the lesson went really well. The students appeared to be engaged in the lesson. They did feel some frustration at the beginning, but all groups did eventually figure out some sort of pattern by the end. We felt that our ultimate goal for the lesson of having our students identify the types of reactions was met. We know this because the students were able to correctly identify the types of reactions on the homework and from the demo day notes that were collected. Changes that were made to the lesson study were involved modifying the pattern list, structuring of the pattern finding day, and adding a Tri-Mind assessment. The reasoning for modifying the patterns list was to eliminate unintentional misconceptions that students found in their patterns that lead them astray. An example of this is that our students noticed diatomics every single replacement reaction. The one complaint that we had about the structure of the pattern finding day was what to do after a group has finished with their patterns list. We decided that finished groups should be given another set to work on until all the rest of the groups are finished. This is more of a classroom management issue and allows the group a chance to contribute their observations during the other group’s presentations. The Tri-Mind assessment was added to incorporate a little more differentiated instruction into our lesson and give the students a tool for the demo day to help them predict products of the demos. This also gives us an individual assessment rather than just a group assessment.
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(c) 2009 ronnster/oharanator productions
