Home | Help | Login | Signup         Jennifer Saden Undergraduate Student Tampa Florida United States Education University of South Florida, St. Petersburg                 My Folios Employment Portfolio FEAP Portfolio FEAP Portfolio Education in Turkey Leonardo DiCaprio Professional Development Portfolio My Employment Portfolio My Learning Portfolio FEAP 2011 Portfolio My Resume                 Back to Folio Evidence #2: Lesson Plan                 Evidence #2: Lesson Plan View File My second evidence is a lesson plan I created and implemented in my Final Internship 2nd grade class. In this lesson, I provided the students with math word problems that required them to use critical thinking skills to solve them. The word problems also included a ‘school map’ that was necessary to solve the problem. The problem required the students to use measurement in meters, which is what they were studying at that time. Once they solved one part of the question, I added more on to that same question. I did that four different times so the students had the opportunity to solve 4 different questions all in the same word problem.                 Reflection This evidence meets the AP of Critical Thinking in many ways. First off, this entire lesson involves thinking critically to find the answer. There is no real direct instruction by me, the teacher. I simply present the problem to them, and allow them time to organize their thoughts and what they need to do to solve the problem. As they are independently working on figuring out this problem, I am constantly moving around the room and checking on each individual student to see their progress. While I do this, I ask each individual student several critical thinking questions to move them in the right direction. I ask questions such as “how far does the map say the cafeteria is from the classroom? Where is John starting? Where is he going next? Do we need any additional information to solve this problem? And Was there information given in the problem that we didn’t need to use?” By using this teaching technique of scaffolding and asking critical thinking questions, the students see the information necessary to solve the problem, and disregard the rest. The most important part is for the students to see HOW to solve the problem. Once they can do that, finding the answer is easy. This is done by providing the problems that encourage critical thinking and my critical thinking questions that help them see the problem in a way that will help them understand it and solve it. This evidence was implemented in my Final Internship 2nd grade class. This lesson plan is one of many of its kind that I implement with my students. The first time I did a word problem activity like this with them, all they wanted to do was add all the numbers involved in the problem together and boom- that was their answer. It has been a very long journey to get where we now are- being able to look at a word problem and think about it in a critical way. Understand it, analyze it, and figure out what it’s asking, and what you need to do next. I also require each student to SHOW their work – I don’t care what strategy they use to get the answer, but they must show me and they must be able to explain what they have done in words. This is how I assess each student’s ability to think critically and use their skills to solve the word problem. The word problems in this lesson plan are very simple; all it involves are (mostly) one-step addition problems. I am not trying to give them a ton of paper and pencil math problems that end up with several digits in the answer. The point of doing this is to help them learn how to think critically on their own. My scaffolding technique of asking critical thinking questions throughout their time working to guide them along has truly helped their critical thinking skills not only in math with their number sense, but in all subject areas.