There are many ways to determine a ‘successful lesson’. During seminar one day, the cohort brainstormed some key components in what makes a good lesson. They came up with a list with things like: having a measurable objective, multiple forms of assessment, activating prior knowledge, pacing, clear direction, modeling with examples, differentiated instruction and wrapping the lesson up with a conclusion to name a few. I agree with my cohort that these are some of the many important ingredients in a good lesson but as I am building my identity as a learner and teacher in the classroom, I want to know if my lessons are successful. In addition to my fellow cohort’s responses to what makes a good lesson I would define a ‘successful lesson’ as students being engaged, having effective classroom management, creating meaningful discourse around the topic and assessing student learning. This portfolio will talk about my current beliefs in what makes a lesson successful in the framework of teacher confidence through flow, student assessment and engagement, and finally, my thought processes as a teacher and learner.
As a learner, I know I need help when I am the least bit unsure or when I do not have 100% confidence in a task. I remember doing my first lesson in the beginning of the school year. My classroom mentor suggested doing an impromptu sink and float lesson to get a feel of what it’s like being in front of the students for the first time. As much as I appreciated my classroom mentor’s intention in giving me my first spontaneous teaching experience I was not completely confident at the time. I had not planned anything in advance other than doing a one-on-one sink and float lesson with my child study the day before. There was no explicit learning goal for this lesson other than to introduce the students to their first science lesson where they can try to guess the outcome. This was an enjoyable experience because I had started to establish good classroom rapport because they were cheering throughout the experiment. From this experience and other lessons after this one, I learned that I need to be absolutely confident whenever I teach in order for it to be a successful lesson.
In addition to teacher confidence, a successful lesson is also about your flow which is a concept that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is famous for. Flow is the “optimal experience” that makes live worth living. When we devote ourselves to a meaningful challenge we can reach a “state of effortless concentration and enjoyment”. Though his concept does not directly relate to pedagogical theories or practices, I found this really beneficial in terms of improving myself as a teacher and learner. Flow can be achieved:
When goals are clear, feedback relevant, and challenges and skills are in balance, attention becomes ordered and fully invested…
Flow occurs when both variables, challenges and skills, are high… When we are in flow, we are not happy, because to experience
happiness we must focus on our inner states and that would take away attention from the task at hand. Only after the task is completed
we have the leisure to look back on what has happened, and then we are flooded with gratitude for the excellent of that experience--
then, in retrospect, we are happy. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997)
In order to achieve flow in teaching, I have to continually devote myself to the challenges in teaching because it is worthwhile to me. One of the many challenge in teaching is figuring out how to be a confident teacher because confidence reflects on the outcome of my lessons. Dr. Rust introduced me to the term flow when I shared two separate shared reading lessons and the outcomes they produced. The first shared reading lesson was on Mrs. Wishy-Washy by Joy Cowley. Earlier in the school year, I had a tendency to write myself a script in my lesson plans where I wrote down and planned exactly what I was going to say. While I was writing my lesson for this lesson, [click for 'wishy' LP] I also focused on two reading objectives: 1) segmenting a word using first, middle and last sound then combining them to spell the word and 2) identifying quotation marks and understanding its purpose. Although I thought I was well and overly prepared by providing myself a script and challenging my students to two reading objectives I quickly learned that it was not a successful lesson. My mentors’ feedback after were that I sounded too rehearsed, I should have gotten more from the students by letting them control their learning and that it was not developmentally appropriate. I did not provide the perfect balance between challenges and skills for myself thus being unable to achieve flow in the lesson. I challenged myself and the students before I could master the skill of lesson planning.
As a learner, I know I need help when I am the least bit unsure or when I do not have 100% confidence in a task. I remember doing my first lesson in the beginning of the school year. My classroom mentor suggested doing an impromptu sink and float lesson to get a feel of what it’s like being in front of the students for the first time. As much as I appreciated my classroom mentor’s intention in giving me my first spontaneous teaching experience I was not completely confident at the time. I had not planned anything in advance other than doing a one-on-one sink and float lesson with my child study the day before. There was no explicit learning goal for this lesson other than to introduce the students to their first science lesson where they can try to guess the outcome. This was an enjoyable experience because I had started to establish good classroom rapport because they were cheering throughout the experiment. From this experience and other lessons after this one, I learned that I need to be absolutely confident whenever I teach in order for it to be a successful lesson.
In addition to teacher confidence, a successful lesson is also about your flow which is a concept that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is famous for. Flow is the “optimal experience” that makes live worth living. When we devote ourselves to a meaningful challenge we can reach a “state of effortless concentration and enjoyment”. Though his concept does not directly relate to pedagogical theories or practices, I found this really beneficial in terms of improving myself as a teacher and learner. Flow can be achieved:
When goals are clear, feedback relevant, and challenges and skills are in balance, attention becomes ordered and fully invested…
Flow occurs when both variables, challenges and skills, are high… When we are in flow, we are not happy, because to experience
happiness we must focus on our inner states and that would take away attention from the task at hand. Only after the task is completed
we have the leisure to look back on what has happened, and then we are flooded with gratitude for the excellent of that experience--
then, in retrospect, we are happy. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997)
In order to achieve flow in teaching, I have to continually devote myself to the challenges in teaching because it is worthwhile to me. One of the many challenge in teaching is figuring out how to be a confident teacher because confidence reflects on the outcome of my lessons. Dr. Rust introduced me to the term flow when I shared two separate shared reading lessons and the outcomes they produced. The first shared reading lesson was on Mrs. Wishy-Washy by Joy Cowley. Earlier in the school year, I had a tendency to write myself a script in my lesson plans where I wrote down and planned exactly what I was going to say. While I was writing my lesson for this lesson, [click for 'wishy' LP] I also focused on two reading objectives: 1) segmenting a word using first, middle and last sound then combining them to spell the word and 2) identifying quotation marks and understanding its purpose. Although I thought I was well and overly prepared by providing myself a script and challenging my students to two reading objectives I quickly learned that it was not a successful lesson. My mentors’ feedback after were that I sounded too rehearsed, I should have gotten more from the students by letting them control their learning and that it was not developmentally appropriate. I did not provide the perfect balance between challenges and skills for myself thus being unable to achieve flow in the lesson. I challenged myself and the students before I could master the skill of lesson planning.
The diagram on the left from Csikszentmihalyi’s talk depicts when flow can be achieved. In order to achieve flow, challenges and skills must be in balance where the task is manageable so you can learn new skills by increasing the challenge (Csikszentmihalyi, 2007). If the challenges and skills are too high it will cause stress and anxiety. Just like how my students’ learning needs to be scaffolded I have to do the same for myself by seeking greater challenges as my skills in teaching increase.
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From the clip 5:10-6:20 I asked the students to identify how we know there is character dialogue and immediately after to identify sight words from our classroom from the text.
8:23-9:15 This clip is about students trying to figure out each sound in the word ‘jump’. Looking back on this clip and other parts of the video, I realized that I dwelled on this part longer than I should have. Before I started the lesson while I was looking it over, it seemed fluid at the time but once I got to the middle of the lesson the students were not engaged as they began to squirm on the rug and I became worried at my delivery which was a result of frequent pausing. For all of these reasons, including the fact that I stated too many objectives in the lesson, this was not a successful lesson. |
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One of my biggest challenges in the classroom was facilitating classroom discourse where I did not know how to bounce the discussion back and forth with the students. Both of my mentors’ feedbacks in my teaching were that I have a linear way of thinking where I tend to blow past through the lesson without stopping to talk to the students. I would feel anxious when I was in front of the students but I persevered by practicing where I am in the process of finding my teaching flow. So how do I know when I am in flow? According to Csikszentmihalyi’s criteria of being in flow, I know that I am experiencing flow during a lesson when I am focused, concentrated, being confident in how well I am doing, not worrying and a feeling of growth becomes its own reward in the end. I have experienced this just recently with another shared reading lesson. During the lesson, [click for 'poetry' LP] I experienced all of the above elements. I stated only one reading objective and I tried to talk with them instead of talking at them by feeding them the information. I felt that this was a successful lesson because I was focused and concentrated on what the students were saying rather than me providing too much information.
As you can see from my mentor’s feedback on the left, she had written three positive, consecutive comments from what she observed which led me to believe I achieved flow. In the blue box, she noted that it was a good reading strategy to support the main idea of the poem by allowing students to physically come up and find the evidence from the text. In the green box, she noted it was a good strategy to reread the poem to correct student misconception. In the red box, it was a "wise decision" to clarify a part of the poem in case some students did not understand it. Instead of telling the students that 'rubber clothes' was a raincoat, rain boots and a rain hat a student knew and told the others.
In relation to Csikszentmihalyi’s philosophy on how to make life worth living, we must do something worthwhile, be happy while doing it, enjoy what you are doing and being good at it (2009). I believe that, in time and with lots of practice, I will become more and more confident in achieving my flow in teaching. |