CED0550 - Week Four

*In reflecting on my teaching experiences to date, I would say that the proportion of teacher centered versus student centered lessons has been different overall in my teaching and when I compare my first 5 years to the past 4 or 5. In the first half of my teaching career I can easily say that the teacher centered lessons comprised about 90-95% of my curriculum. At that time, I started taking some other classes and really was challenging how I approached the classroom. Ever since then I have been incorporating more student centered lessons and I’d love to say that I’ve completely flipped the 90% to student centered but unfortunately I’m not there yet. I would guess that at least 35-40% of my lessons now are student centered.

*I was able to identify more than one authentic assessment to measure mastery of a single concept lesson when I changed the lesson to reflect being student centered as well as when I incorporated more differentiation into the lesson. For every alternative activity there are a multiple of various assessments that can be envisioned.

*The rubric I created for my lesson clearly defined expectations and scoring for the lesson so that my students could start the project with a definite goal in mind. The rubric could be used somewhat like a checklist to work through each section so that the expectations are indicated as objectives to meet before the lesson even begins.

*While working on this module I had difficulty while narrowing down my lesson. I tend to think and teach in big concepts and units with activities spanning multiple days and sometimes even units. For example, the lesson I chose involved the prerequisite knowledge of construction and use of a dichotomous key. I originally didn’t explain that as a class, we would have already done the lessons on classification, key use and key construction so that the students would be drawing upon those experiences to help them create the key for this lesson. So my issue was keeping the topic narrow enough without throwing out all of the related activities that would help make the students successful. On the topic of keeping things broad and sweeping, I also have issues with really zeroing in on targeted differentiation - I tend to start brainstorming ideas and then ramble on and on.