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 #3: Lesson Taught                 Evidence #3: Lesson Taught View File My third evidence is a lesson plan I created and implemented in my Final Internship 2nd grade class. This lesson was the first of 10 implemented as a part of my Teacher Work Sample unit project. In this lesson, I introduce the unit to them, and we make predictions on the unit vocabulary words. We then discuss the first lesson and do a workbook activity.                 Reflection My third evidence meets AP#4 in many ways. First, I provide several different opportunities throughout the implementation of the lesson for students to answer critical thinking questions. This is first presented in the vocabulary predicting portion. The students were required to look at the term and the corresponding picture in the book to predict the meaning of the word. This activity allowed the students to use their higher order thinking skills in order to properly identify the definitions to the best of their ability. When I teach science, I follow it out more as a class discussion than a lecture. Every couple sentences I read to them from the book, we stop and talk about it. As stated in my lesson plan, I stop to ask the entire class questions such as “What is the difference between a producer and a consumer?, Which animal do you think would need more water, a large one or a small one? Why?, Why do animals need food?, etc.”. Questions like these enable students to enhance and further develop their critical thinking skills. After the whole group discussion, the students work cooperatively in the small groups at their round tables to answer the question “what do all animals need?” This activity promotes higher order thinking because not only do they have to analyze the question and use critical thinking to answer it, but they have to cooperate with their group members to share their answers and come up with one overall consensus for their group. Next, yet another performance activity is implemented by completing the T-Chart activity on the board as a class. The purpose of this is to write a basic need on the left side of the chart (what they came up with in their groups), and then to think critically to be able to come up with HOW these needs are and can be met. This evidence was implemented in my Final Internship class, and I feel every student benefited from it. First of all, I provided numerous critical thinking questions to guide my students in the right direction, and also to help them practice this way of thinking and answering questions. The questions I asked, and the questions asked in the activities we did, are not the type where they search for the answer in a book or something. These types of questions require students to find the answers within their own mind, with their own knowledge. They have to use their brains in a new way, a way that teaches them how to think for themselves, analyze data, and develop their own conclusions. Also, I provided an array of strategy types throughout this lesson to promote critical thinking. At the beginning of the lesson, each student works independently to engage their higher-order thinking skills. Next, we participate in a whole-class discussion where I ask critical thinking questions to the class to help guide their thinking and learning’ and next, the students create in cooperative learning activities where they have to learn to think critically within a group.