Reflections of Capstone Project

Adjusted Situations

            On numerous occasions, I had to adjust my time frame for an activity.

            The first time I gave a review assignment, I paired the students and told them to work on the problems together. I had allotted 5 minutes in my lesson plan, but as I walked around answering questions, I found they had gaps in their application of skills. They had worked on the area of a parallelogram and a triangle on Monday, but by Wednesday of the same week, they barely remembered the formula, and if a problem had a missing piece of information, they couldn’t remember what to do to find that information. I had to re-teach the Pythagorean Theorem and how to manipulate it to find the information they needed to solve the problems. That activity extended from 5 minutes to 25 minutes. After class the Host Teacher and I discussed the event and he said that the class had very low academic skills and was amazed that we got through all that we did in our time together.

During the third and fourth lessons, I had to adjust the review activity. The students really enjoyed working on the chalkboard, but the work they showed had major flaws with previous learning. The concepts I had just taught in my previous lesson were okay, but the concepts they had to use from lessons earlier in the term were still shaky and they needed more guidance to apply the concepts properly. In many of these lessons, I usually wrote out a procedure for the students to write down and use when solving the problems on their assignments. This group seemed to need lots of review and remediation to use the concepts I was teaching. I had allotted about 10 to 15 minutes for review, and had to extend it to 25 or 30 minutes. I considered the possibility that they were possibly playing like they didn’t know or understand, but when I asked guiding questions, they gave blank looks. But, later, when I graded their papers, I realized they were not playing, they really did not understand previous concepts and could not apply their learning to new and novel situations. This was a tough group to teach, but their assessment results showed that almost every one of the students made progress.