Here We Go Again

So Mike and I got to teach together for a second time this semester.  This time around it did not feel as much as a whirlwind.  Within an hour and a half time period we taught two different lessons to a great group of students.  The hour and a half was broken into two parts: direct and inquiry lesson.  Within those parts we explored the scientific method.  This time around we were the last group to present and I felt like we had a much better grasp of what we were doing this time.

Overall we did a good jog of being prepared with our materials, staying on topic, and keeping students focused.  But, no matter how prepared you something can always go wrong and it did.  While setting up for our lessons, I got to the classroom first and went to hook up my laptop to the smartboard just to find out it was not compatible with the smartboard equipment.  When Mike got to the classroom he loaded his laptop and we had everything we needed except our smartboard activities.  I spent a couple of minutes to reconstruct our activities and we were on our way.  This taught me that you should always be prepared, but, you also need to be able to roll with what ever comes your way.  Some of the things that went well in the lesson today were our time management between the two lessons.  The lessons also flowed into each other and kept the students engaged.  The students also like coming to the smartboard to do our guided practice activities.  The lesson was not perfect, but it was definitely better then our first time teaching.  In the direct lesson we could have had more stop and think questions after every couple of slides.  This would have enforced the concepts even more.  In the inquiry lesson we could have allowed each student present their results instead of as a group.  There were only 5 students in the class that day and we had time for them to all present.  We also ran out of time and were not able to give the students their post-assessment sheet. 

 
Direct Instruction Lesson:
The direct lesson plan focused on the scientific method. We taught the steps of the scientific method and the concept for each step.  Students repeated the step and concept after each slide. 


Inquiry Instruction Lesson:
The inquiry lesson plan focused the execution of the scientific method.  Students conducted an experiment using the scientific method.