Hannah Oberlander
EDUC 614
Formative Video Analysis
The things that I did well and would like to continue doing in my classroom are
the Talk-and-Turn routine, the guided questions with student choice, and having the
student find page numbers to support their answers when they responded. With the Talkand-Turn structure, students are required to participate by verbalizing a response to a
prompt or question. This activity also enables the students give immediate feedback
about how their brains are processing the lesson. In addition, the Talk-and-Turn routine
breaks up the lesson in to manageable chunks so that the students’ attention is
maintained. I want to keep incorporating Talk-and-Turn into my lessons as I notice from
this video lesson how paramount it is to the engagement of my students during the length
of the lesson. Talk-and-Turn also prevents me from lecturing to the students and keeps
me accountable to bring the students into the discussion.
The guiding questions I used had been thought through beforehand with the
purpose in mind of having the students go deeper with the idea of identifying setting. I
want to “let go” of trying to dominate the discussion; though, and want to use the guiding
questions to have students lead the discussion with less support and direction from me.
Perhaps if I model this with my students, they will in time begin driving the lesson more
with their answers rather than with my answers.
I also want to continue having the students “prove” their answers by going back to
the text and locating the page and paragraph the support is found that supports their
responses. This is something that I can keep modeling for my students, praising students
who do this on their own initiative, and requiring students to do so that they expect that I
will be asking a follow up question: “What makes you say that from the book?” or
“Where can we find the proof of that in the text?” I notice how my own teaching has
evolved since taking this class as I have been actively trying to insert it into the flow of
my teaching in the past few weeks.
The areas I would like to change are in the areas of interactions, differentiation,
and assessment. Sometimes during my question/answer interactions with students, I
jump in too quickly with an answer and need to work on my own “wait time” for
individual student responses to the questions I ask. I tend to talk more than I would like,
and I felt like I answered some of the overall questions for the whole group during the
web design rather than really drawing those answers out of the students themselves. I
think I am afraid that students won’t offer the right answers, and I don’t want their wrong
answers to be verbalized aloud for the whole group for fear that other students will get
confused. This is a bias I want to overcome, and my lack of “wait time” is my innate
response to “covering” for a student when they hesitate so that the “right answer” gets
mentioned soon after the question is asked. I want to work on effect ways to direct a
student’s wrong answer toward the right one. Perhaps I could learn strategies or followup questions to transform students’ inaccurate responses into learning opportunities to
guide their thinking towards accurate responses. I also need to be more open minded
towards more than one right response, and view my students’ responses from multiple
perspectives to see where they are coming from.
Differentiation was definitely an area of weakness in this lesson as I did not
scaffold the lesson nor did I offer opportunities for students to work with much support
from me as the teacher. I taught this lesson whole group, because I had not yet divided
my students up into reading leveled groups. I had not done this yet, because I had not
given the pre-assessment to formulate the groups. The students were clearly of varying
degrees of ability, and yet I was teaching them the same concept with very little
differentiation in the activities that I was having them do. In the end, they all just copied
the web I wrote on the board. If I had prepared the particular groups of students who
were at different leveled abilities with a pre-assessment, I could have assigned them a
setting question that was well suited for their thinking ability. Then we could have all
shared the responses, and I could have spent more of my time with the group of students
with the lower level thinking questions that may have needed my support. I could have
also let these teams of students lead the discussion and fill in the web with what they
thought was the key word from their answer to “teach” the class how they thought
through the question and went back to the text to prove their answer.
The lesson lacked a clear-cut, measurable assessment to identify students’
strengths and weaknesses in comprehending the idea of setting other than the informal
observations I made during Talk-and-Turns and teacher led question and answer. I think
the reason I had not planned this was because my students struggle at this point in the
year to write down their thoughts, and it takes a long time. Hence, I am always looking
for ways to cut out much of the writing and find other forms of assessment. However, I
wish I had had the students use a graphic organizer to record their findings to the question
they had chosen. Perhaps I could have a simple graphic organizer with the parts: (1)
Question Answer, (2) What makes you think that? And (3) Where (page number) is this
found in the text? Another assessment I could have implemented could have been a
simple summarizing activity at the end of the lesson like a “reflection,” in which the
students stopped and jotted down what they had learned, reviewed, or thought was
interesting from the lesson. This assessment activity could have been a great closure
piece as well as a realistic assessment measure. Perhaps the students could have written
one thing they thought was important from the lesson, one thing they thought was
interesting from the lesson, and one question they still have about the lesson.