Lesson Plan Reflection

Lewis 1

Barry Lewis

Catherine Fallona

EDU 320

December 18, 2009

Lesson Plan Reflection

I had become quite comfortable being with my field placement students, so I don't think it
was because of them that I felt nervous before the start of my lesson. I think it was a simple
case of performance anxiety. I should try to incorporate those relaxation techniques that I
learned in my acting class this semester into my daily life so that they can actually be effective
when I need them. Teaching depends on many things, but that it is fundamentally a performance
piece should never be overlooked. This marks another type of life-change that my career-change
has set in motion, that is, moving more outwardly in my engagements with the world. Good, I’m
kind of ready for that kind of change. It was funny, though. I was drawing a parabola on the
board before class started and it took several attempts of ironing out line-wiggle before I had
something that I could stand to look at!

That nervousness dissolved quickly once I was under way. I had a few key points scripted
but I was going to let the real pace of things determine how much of that I would actually use.
My class (eleventh grade algebra) is generally noisy and I did need to make a small feint towards
adjusting that level early on, enough to quell what I thought was “too much” distraction (more
about this later). My opening material was intended to get my students to make connections
with familiar examples of some of the lesson’s content (parabolas). I believe this is an important
activity, and I’d do it again, but I think some students in this class, not yet smelling the smoke of
burning mathematics, felt little need to pay much attention (not that they would necessarily pay
more later!), and that’s where most of the noise came (more about this later, too). The volume
level did drop when, interestingly enough, the subject matter went deeper into math, in this
case, deeper into the mechanics of parabolic behavior. This was not meant to be a class that ex-
plored those aspects of parabolas, which are usually left for geometry or calculus lessons, but I
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wanted to briefly detail those features in order to illustrate why the behavior of a parabola is so
“well organized” and why the points on a parabola can be determined by a quadratic equation,
which is more properly the subject of this lesson.

My lesson featured a real-world scenario, but the realness was only in the setting and de-
tails of otherwise wholly improbable and fantastic events. Real real-world scenarios that might
truly interest my group of late adolescents, for example, teenage literacy rates in the United
States or growth rates of viruses or how credit card companies profit from customers in the
same demographic that my students will soon belong to, are all modeled by more complicated
equations than we were prepared to deal with. And certainly any scenario like those would take
more than one class period to develop. At the same time, usable scenarios, the kind that litter
math books everywhere, are often hopelessly practical and mundane (how often do we fence in
a herd of sheep beside a river?). I felt that my class would respond to an imaginative and quirky
story better than they would to something utterly practical, and I think I got that right.

There would be plenty of solid math involved, but first, explaining my diagram, pausing af-
ter saying "and there is a man running along this road. His name is Bond, ..." and cocking my ear
towards the class, they supplied the requisite "...James Bond" right on cue. Humor and a touch
of the bizarre worked well with this class. These students are, for the most part, lacking for
three things: math skills, confidence and self-esteem. My host teacher, Nate, understands that
most of them are under a lot of stress just being in this class and he tries to teach them without
ratcheting those stress levels too much higher. I tired to do the same.

While I think I did well with the tone of the lesson, I completely underestimated how
much we could actually do. I aimed the beginning of the assessment at fairly basic facility with
the concepts in play for this unit (quadratic equations), but was still surprised at how long it
took to get through it. The problem for many seemed to be less about ability and more about
focus, or if not focus, then the simple decision to commit to work. I spoke with Nate about my
time estimates for my plan, saying, "You know, I thought this part might have taken about fifteen
minutes or so, at most." We spent almost twice as much time. Nate told me, "I asked them*
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'How long do you think this would've taken if you had decided to actually work and be produc-
tive?' They said: about fifteen minutes."

The them* here is the same group from which most of the distracting noise emanated at
the beginning of my lesson (let's name them Table One). Table One is an enthusiastic but not
very productive group. Most of them (they usually number 5 or 6) had done well on on the first
question, and then just... stopped. I agree with Nate's thoughts about this. There are limits, not
only to what we as teachers can do, but also to what we should do. These are 16 and 17 year old
individuals. They drive cars and trucks. They'll be voting soon. If they're going to college, they'll be
there in less than two years. They should be responsible for their learning, at least insofar as hav-
ing the determination they bring to that proposition. Their sense of responsibility and their de-
termination are not features for my classroom management strategies to address or remedy. As
a teacher, I believe I have an obligation to seek ways to inspire my students—each one— to ig-
nite their own sense of curiosity and amazement and desire for growth. I have a lot to learn
about ways of doing that, but what I'll never be able to do is to reach inside and hotwire some-
one's discovery engine all by myself.

There are, however, other aspects of our classroom world that are my responsibility to
manage and, when necessary, remedy. One thing I would definitely do differently in my lesson, if I
had a time machine, would be to challenge the Chaos. There is a highly social, almost club-like
quality to Nate's classroom. Group work is the norm, unless you'd rather work by yourself, in
which case you can. It's a way of working that has many benefits, including keeping things re-
laxed, but given the high probability of wandering focus, there's the strong likelihood that un-
productive chatter and unhelpful chaos (I've seen helpful chaos) will escalate. Now, there is sup-
posedly a consensus among the class that goes something like, "Group Chaos shall never be so
great as to ruin an Individual's ability to learn." (will consider tattooing that onto my classroom
wall). But when the noise level did just that, I should have done something dramatic. I should
have trumped the noise with noise of my own, some short, blaring AHH-OOO-GAAHHH sort
of warning klaxon sound that could arrest the chaos right there on the spot. (Or, I suppose I
could've stood on the desk, Ahab-like, silently calling for attention.) Then I should’ve reminded
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everyone of the terms of their own agreement. I should have done that. It would have been well
worth stopping the lesson and having that moment, or conversation, or whatever it would've
become, however long it would've taken.

As an example of this problem, one student told me that a solution he had worked out
disagreed with his common sense understanding of the graph (sweet words!). We talked about
why the value he found was a negative number when there's no way it could be a negative num-
ber. So I tried to launch this moment into the class so that we could all reflect on this, see if
anyone else had found the same wrong result, address the importance of intuition, etc. There are
a lot of places that moment could have led to, but nothing went anywhere because I couldn't get
everyone's attention. I could barely get anyone's attention. So, I returned to visiting individuals
and groups, knowing that something good had been lost.

Because the classroom is a group of humans, all sorts of contradictions are likely to flour-
ish. As distracting as Table One had been in the beginning, it was one of its members who asked
a question about my parabolic mechanics illustration. He was actually intrigued with what went
on "under the hood" of parabolas and his interest helped focus the whole class on the subject. I
did have some technology with me, but not handy and not prepared to go at a moment's notice.
I say I had it, but I didn't think I'd need it and I didn't think I'd have time for such a side trip. Too
bad. It was a fantastic applet that beautifully demonstrated exactly what C. was asking me about.
In the future, I'll try not to think my way out of what I feel I might need. If I want to help stu-
dents surprise themselves with their own curiosity, I should be prepared to protect those wisps
of brilliance as soon as they sprout.

It was another colorful member of Table One, and also the loudest, who took the
mathematics of this bizarre skate-boarding, nemesis-evading, canal-surfing James Bond scenario
and ran with it, several times straight up to me with questions and insights, and pushed himself
past "meets" and right into "exceeds." Sure, that felt pretty good. But what about those students
who were stuck in "does not meet," and not because they could care less? Some care a lot but
have genuine disabilities, e.g. R. who told me, "I don't know what to do with this. I'm not good
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with new things." or K., who is working, working, working, and exhausting herself because her
fundamental skills are so weak. Some students in my class have IEP's. They and others will need
one on one time with Nate. Differentiated instruction is a good way of spreading a signal across
different frequencies of communication, but for some learners, that's only the beginning of what will
really support their growth.

I think my most important lesson from this teaching experience is the importance of cre-
ating a sustaining class climate. Nate has asked his students about their experience with other
teachers. They tell him that some are much stricter about the Noise and the Chaos. "And are
you more productive in those classes?" he asks them. "No. Not really," they say. Nate is still
working out ways to find a balance between stress and comfort, between expectation and
achievement, between asking and telling—between hanging out and hanging in. I see the search
for this balance as the core process that supports the vibrancy of an entire classroom's ecosys-
tem. This idea will be one that I focus on for as long as I teach.