Joey's 2nd LA Reflection

Students learned that there are various ways to organize a paper and not every way is appropriate for every topic/purpose.  They also learned that multiple organizational patterns can be used on the same piece, depending on your preference for writing.  Again, R, my ELL student struggled with this lesson.  He reads at a very basic level in English and it is difficult for him to comprehend directions.  However, Madi was once again able to work one on one with him to be very explicit about what needed to be done in this lesson.  Though this may work now, I need to come up with a different solution, as I will not always have that extra help when I have my own classroom.

 

 I feel that the lesson went well and the students learned much about organization and were able to practice using the organizational patterns that I presented them with.  However, I get the feeling that many of them had already had experience with these patterns and simply coasted through the lesson without telling me they had already had practice with this.

 

 I learned that while my students were very good at identifying examples of when they have seen or used organizational patterns outside of class, they struggled with creating their own writing piece using one of the patterns.  Many of the students could not seem to identify an organizational pattern that fit their paragraph that I had them write.  They would simply write and then would try to find one of the patterns that fit, rather than picking an organizational pattern and designing their paragraph based on that pattern.

 

 I ended up teaching another lesson on organizational patterns two days after this lesson.  I felt that the students needed more practice with picking a pattern and sticking to it when creating a writing piece. I saw that too many students were struggling with this and were tending to write without thinking about organization.  I felt that it was necessary to model how to properly construct a well-organized paper.  I walked them through a brainstorming process and then organizing my thoughts on paper once I had them written down.  This made it easier for students to see that thinking about to organize a writing piece before starting it is essential to becoming an efficient writer. 

 

 If I were to teach this lesson again I would scaffold the students more, before proceeding to the final part of the lesson.  I feel that having them move straight to creating their own paragraph that quickly was a mistake.  Many of the students were able to do this without a problem, but several were not.  If I teach this lesson to a new group of students I will make sure to model my own paragraph and discuss this with them before having them try it themselves.

 

 Again I went group to group and made sure I heard at least one thing from each member.  I struggle with how to help R during my lessons.  Madi does a great job helping him, but I’m wondering if there is a way to make him more self-sufficient for when he may not be getting the one on one help.  Maybe I could have a version of the assignment in Spanish for him to reference when he does not understand the directions.

 

 

      I learned that one of the best ways to scaffold students learning is though modeling what I want them to do myself.  I was able to take a lesson that many struggled with and turn the outcome completely around by creating a different lesson with much more scaffolding and modeling of exactly what I expected of them.