Edss 300

EDSS 300 is part of the Single Subject Credential program here at CSULB. In this course, we complete 35 hours of classroom observation and learn different educational philosophies and techniques. One aspect of the course I will take with me is our units spent learning about differentiated education for students with exceptionalities, and cultural responsiveness in the classroom.

Lesson Reflection Below!

In this lesson with a first-grade class, we explored different styles of music and practiced interpreting music by assigning each song to an animal that we discussed together. This lesson used a pair-share model to encourage students to come to their own conclusions and learn from each other’s unique funds of knowledge.

Strengths 

Classroom Management: 
- 2:59 “I will answer a quiet hand” Instead of giving negative feedback directly to a student blurting out an answer, I calmly reminded the class of our expectation, and gave positive     attention to a student who was following our expectations (raising their hands to answer a question). 
- 2:21 I provided a count down to when I wanted the students to get quiet, giving them long enough to finish their thoughts and quiet down to avoid trying to shout over them to get their attention. 
Connecting to students individually: 
- 1:44 During each of the think-pair-share sections of the activity, I walked between groups listening to conversations, and prompting students with questions if they seemed to not know what to say. I made sure to give genuine compliments to students, they often gave descriptions that surprised me as I hadn’t thought of them.
- 7:16 While listening to student conversations, I heard a student say an answer I really wanted the class to hear! I asked the student to please share what he has told me, and praised him for his answer.
Time management:
- 2:28 I informed the students that I would only be taking three raised hands to write comments on the board. This is an aspect of classroom management because it helped them plan to stop offering answers after three hands were raised, but it also helped me to stay within a shorter time frame. 
Flexibility:
- 4:40 Going in to the lesson, I didn’t consider that some student might not have known what one of our animals was! I took for granted that all students would have the same basic funds of knowledge, as discussed below in my reteach strategies section. However, I did not panic, and I just described a swan and encouraged the students to share their knowledge with their peers during their paired discussions. 
- 14:10 This mooment was the beginning of the roller coaster that was the next couple of songs. The students interpreted the music completely different than I had, and the next three songs they voted for animals that I had not assigned each song to. At this point in the lesson, I was thinking fast, trying to decide if I should “correct” them to interpret the music how I had expected them to (the way I interpreted it). I decided not to, and I’m glad. As the songs went on, the students interpreted the music more creatively than I could have imagined, and fully reached the objective of the lesson, which was to connect animals to music and practice describing what the hear by comparing it to things they can see. This was so exciting. 

Weaknesses 

Goal setting for the lesson 
- 0:10 at the beginning of the lesson, I introduce the activity as “pretending to be different animals”. This is technically true, but it doesn’t really give them any hint to what we are learning or doing in class today. After saying that I immediately jump in to the activities first stage. I definitely should have a better way of introducing the lesson, and will turn it more in to a game to explain the guessing and connecting portion in the future. 
Classroom management: 
  - 10:53 At this point we are ten minutes in to the lesson, and I am still dealing with blurting out answers and chatting while my back is turned the same way. It may have been helpful to remind the students of our classroom expectations and use the classroom management system set up to help them, instead of sushing them.
Timing of the lesson
- 13:10 I knew that this lesson was going longer than I had planned for, and yet I called on a student who blurted out that they had a fun fact. I had felt bad because the student clearly wanted to share something, but I should have enforced that he had to follow classroom expectations of raising his hand to be called on. In a lesson that was already lengthy, I could have saved time and helped to remind him of our class policies. 
Closing of the lesson:
- 19:04 This was a pretty weak ending, and not as professional as I would have liked. “Cool.” is not an inspiring end to a lesson. I could have thanked them for playing pretend with me, congratulated them on discovering four different animals in music, or told them that I had fun! All of these statements are true, and far more professional. 

Reteach Strategies

- When I have the opportunity to reteach this lesson, I hope to set up the objective of the activity clearer for the students. I will “gameify” to lesson, and explain the object of the “game” to the students so they have context for what we are doing. I believe that this informal goal setting will help the students feel more successful after completing the lesson, and will help them with self assessment. 
- Next time I teach this activity, I plan to limit the number of musical animal examples that I use in order to help keep the activity to 10 minutes. We spent much of the activity discussing traits of music and animals together, and I value the think-pair-share model that we took the time to complete for each example. Instead of rushing them though this, I would rather narrow the amount of examples. As well, I plan to make use of a countdown timer on the board to keep our paired discussions within the same time limit regularly so that students know what to expect. 
- To help the timing of the lesson, after the students vote for what animal they think the piece is about, I may ask them to give me a thumbs up or down if think they heard something representative of each descriptor for the animal we came up with. After that, I will ask one student to explain one example. 
- When planning this lesson, I considered the fact that different students may have different funds of knowledge about certain animals, and that they may be able to share their interests with their peers. However, I did not take in to consideration that some students may have no knowledge about the animals. In the future, I will show a video of the animals moving in nature to alleviate this issue. This will also help to narrow our conversation, as the students will have specific imagery and movements in mind.
- An issue that I ran in to with this class is that some of the descriptive words and phrases we came up with were difficult to connect to music (such as some snakes being venomous). Next time I teach this lesson, I might try having a word bank of adjectives that students can assign to our chosen animals along with peer generated descriptions. I am interested to see if this helps them make musical connections, or if this would act as a crutch and would stop them from thinking critically.