Investigation of the Western expansion

Wednesday: Inquiry

This lesson was a lot less nerve-wracking than the first. After teaching direct, I felt more confident, and ready to teach this lesson. Despite this, I was nervous for a different reason. Groups 1-3 had a lot of trouble with this lesson for a number of reasons. Even though we tried to account for all of these problems and fix them the best we could, the lesson was not perfect. 

Since the desks were situated into 3 groups of 8 or 9, it put our group in a tough spot. Do we waste time in reorganizing the students into smaller groups, or work with the large groups and save a lot of transition time? After some deliberation, we decided to keep the students in large groups to save transition time, and to assign roles to keep the group on task. We reasoned that by giving many roles to the group, it would be easier o keep in control, and to make sure everybody was doing something. 

Because of the large groups, the classroom was very loud, and busy. Despite having at least one teacher per group at all times, it was still difficult to manage the class volume, and to ensure all students were participating in the group. After the first group took about ten minutes to read, investigate, and fill in our templates, I was nervous that we would go over time like many of the other groups did; however, after the first group took ten minutes, the following two groups were able to finish in five minutes. 

In the end, we were able to get our time back on track, and finish in time to give the class their independent practice to be completed in class. Nearly all of the students finished this in time, and few others took this home for homework. 

Overall, I was happy with this lesson. Dr. Smirnova offered us some advice at the end of the lesson on how it could have been improved and we all absolutely agreed. Giving the students more direction on the inquiry process would have been helpful. Also, if we included worksheets that included this information, it would have made the class go a lot smoother. Overall, I think it went very well! o

One more lesson to go! We are going to try to take the advice of Dr. Smirnova, and from our colleagues' reflections on our lessons to hopefully make our last lesson the best yet! 

(Thanks Maureen for the pictures!)