Lesson Reflection

Reflect on your teaching experience. Write a paragraph response to each of the following questions, and don’t forget to use and underline vocabulary from the theories we have learned to answer these questions.

• How well do you feel your lesson helped develop your students’ abilities to use metacognition to be successful? Explain.
• How well do you feel your lesson helped develop a growth mindset in your students? Explain.
• How well do you feel your lesson motivated your students? Which strategies were successful and how could you improve?
• How well do you feel your lesson met your students’ cognitive development needs? Explain.

• How well do you feel your lesson met your students’ identity development needs? Explain.
• How well do you feel your lesson met your students' moral development needs? Explain.
• Did the learning theory you chose work well for these students? Why or why not?
• How might using another theory have improved the lesson or made it less effective?

When I was planning my lesson, I didn't really think about developing my student's metacognition. But, the lesson I constructed did have a couple elements that could be applied to metacognition. For example, I had the students create a dichotomous key, but to do this, they first had to plan out a vague idea of how they would separate their candies. While they were creating the key, they had to monitor how it was going, and make sure they were including everything. And after they had finished their dichotomous key, they then had to evaluate the key, and go back and change their descriptions if there was anything that didn't fit. But, I don't know if this counts as metacognition since they were using those steps in creating a key, and not in evaluating their learning habits. So, although I think it was a good lesson to teach the concept, I don't think it would have been very successful if my goal had been to develop my students' ability to use metacognition.

Because I had placed in my lesson many different points for the students to check, and re-evaluate their dichotomous key, I think it worked pretty well to help promote a growth mindset. If I had not given the students plenty of room for error, then any small mistakes they made would have seemed bigger, and could have devastated a students want to improve. The different checkpoints I had the students go through, along with the scaffolding I used to first introduce them to the process, was designed to make sure students were confident knowing they would be able to succeed before they started making their own keys. And if they did make a mistake, it was not a big deal, they could just modify a few things and move on. Plus, they were working with partners, so they had an extra buffer in case they got stuck. Overall, I think it was a lesson that helped develop a growth mindset in the students.

When I first started the lesson, I had some students come up to the front of the class, and we made a dichotomous key based off their t-shirts. This was fun for all of the students, and having a live example motivated pretty much all of the students to participate. When I had the students work on their own dichotomous keys using candy, the candy was a huge extrinsic motivator because I told them they couldn't eat the candy unless they were able to successfully key it out first. I could tell some of the kids were more motivated by the candy than they were the activity itself, because they just hurried and made a key using similar descriptions as we had used in the t-shirt example, but some kids did seem intrinsically motivated to get as creative as they possibly could-that was really fun to watch. I hope some (or most!) of the students were intrinsically motivated by the clue/puzzle aspect of dichotomous keys that is really fun for me, but the extrinsic motivation of the candy was easier for me to see. Overall though, the students were motivated to understand and complete the task I set out for them.

The information I was giving the students wasn't anything too ground-breaking, but it was something new to them. Although they had never heard of dichotomous keys, they have been classifying things based on physical characteristics their whole lives. So, they just had to assimilate the new terms and organized way of using a dichotomous key to their already existing schema of classification. This system of classification works well with the concrete operational stage that they, as 7th graders, are still in, or just around there. One of the descriptions of the concrete operational stage is the ability to classify objects according to several features and order them in series  (https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Motivation_and_emotion/Book/2013/Developmental_changes_in_motivation) which worked great for my dichotomous key lesson! So, I think the lesson worked well for the students cognitive development needs!

The lesson I made gave students plenty of opportunity to be creative and unique, which I think is important for the students because most of them are probably struggling with an Identity vs Role confusion crisis in their junior high age. It is important for them to be able to be creative so they can see themselves as a unique individual, while still accomplishing the task that I set out for them. The opportunity to accomplish the task works well for the industry vs inferiority crisis because, as I explained before, it was set up with fail-safes so everyone could accomplish the task if they tried. This would be good for them feel a sense of accomplishment, instead of inferiority if they were to fail, which nobody did, they all did great! So, I think the lesson worked well for the students identity development needs!

I didn't really put anything in place for the students to develop their moral reasoning in my lesson. But, because they all seem to be in the conventional stage of moral development, they all just accepted the rules I laid out for them, and just behaved how I wanted them to. I'm not sure if this was because they are in the interpersonal stage, so they were just doing it to make me and the teacher happy, or if it was more the law and order stage where they just obeyed the rules of our classroom society. I didn't really question it, because it just worked out pretty easily for me. Plus, the lesson I planned didn't really have anything that would have caused moral issues, at least not that I'm aware of.

Like I mentioned in my Lesson Description post, I didn't think to actively form my lesson plan around a specific learning theory, but the one that it most closely relates to is the Information Processing model, because my goal was to use as many senses as I could cram into a little lesson as possible. But, now that I've gone through the module on modern constructivism, it would have been cool for me to use some of those models to teach the lesson. For example, I could have tried a Problem-based learning experience where I just told the students their assigned task, and let them have at it. I had a couple examples they could use as resources if they wanted to. It would have been really interesting for me to see what they came up with! But, that might have required a little bit more time than I had. For my future class, though, that is something I would like to do! So, the information processing theory worked well for my lesson, but I think modern constructivism might have worked better.