Term III - the rest of the recap

A few weeks ago, I described the Term III assignment, a few days ago, I finished it. In between was a LOT of writing, but the most interesting and valuable part was definitely getting to develop and teach a lesson for each of the core subject areas.

I gave a brief summary a couple weeks ago, and a more detailed description of my Science lesson a couple weeks before that, but I thought I would go ahead and do something in between, providing a short description of each of the lessons I taught to my third graders:

• Science: My lesson focused on Rocks and Minerals, since that was the science unit that the school wanted my class to be working on, and because the school owns a pretty sweet Rocks and Minerals kit. I wanted to use the lesson as an introductory activity, getting them looking at rocks closely while building observation and classification skills. Students observed and recorded observations of individual rocks, then compared their rocks with their partners' rocks, then practiced classifying piles of rocks based on observed characteristics. To assess and apply their classification skills, we then played a 20 Questions-like game, where I had a hidden rock that matched one of the rocks from their pile, and the students had to take turns asking yes-or-no questions until they found the right one.
• Literacy: My lesson focused on giving students a chance to practice approaching informational texts with particular questions in mind. Since they were reading about food chains in class, we did a guided practice with their readers trying to answer the question, "What food chains can you find in different settings," using a list of words that students had generated to skim for. Then, students broke into pairs and dug through piles of books to see what other food chains they could find. Finally, we reconvened, shared some findings, and generated new questions that we could ask if we were to return to these books.
• Math: My lesson was focused on measurements, but I quickly learned that students' understandings of measurements were much more basic than I had anticipated, and thus much of my lesson was inappropriate for their level of understanding. I ended up improvising a new set of activities aimed to promote some fundamental concepts, such as the idea that an object doesn't change size even when you measure it wrong. It's amazing how much of early elementary education is about psychology and figuring out basic understandings and conceptions - that's at once one of the most challenging and fascinating parts of the job.
• Social Studies: My lesson focused on the idea of fairness - what does it actually mean? I wanted students to begin to see fairness as something nuanced, contextual, and subjective, because I think understanding and developing one's opinions about equity is really essential to almost any area of public policy or historical understanding. For this lesson, I had students define "fairness," then I did activities to challenge them on that: first, the 4 students had to evenly distribute 8 marbles...but then I asked why I wasn't included, and challenged them to come up with a "fair" division; next, I gave pencils to everybody who needed one, then asked if that was fair even though I didn't give pencils to everyone. Finally, I gave the students a lot of scenarios on sticky notes, and had them (in pairs) rank them physically on the wall according to how fair they thought they were. They seemed surprised by how differently their peers ranked things, and the concluding discussion introduced a lot of more complex concepts related to equity (equality of access, of opportunity, of treatment, of participation, etc.).

Tying all of these together, my guiding question was about the use of partner work as a tool for differentiation - having students at different levels of proficiency with a different topic or skill work together in ways that support both.

Take all those ingredients, add some observer feedback and extensive video evidence, and apply an exorbitant amount of analysis and commentary. Lay it out in a website, submit to five instructors, and take a very, very deep breath.