Lesson Plan Reflection

As I reflect on my teaching, student learning, implementation of technology, and the lesson plan as a whole, I am incredibly pleased with the overall presentation. This particular unit in which I chose to implement technology, is a major part of our reading workshop and is a building block for the “thinking about characters” that will take place for the duration of the year. The unit focuses on growing theories about characters and making inferences based on the character’s thoughts and actions throughout the story. Rather than having the students write a book report, which can be tedious and somewhat boring after a while, I chose to implement technology and have the students create a PowerPoint presentation on the main character in their book. As an educator, I recognize the value of partnerships and having conversations about reading with others. My fifth graders are involved in Book Clubs, which I created based on interest and strengths and struggles in reading. The number one aspect of this lesson plan I did revise after some more thinking and reflecting on student learning, is I decided to have the fifth graders create one PowerPoint presentation as a book club focusing on the main character in their book. Originally, I was going to have students create a PowerPoint presentation on his or her own based on the character from their book club story. There are two major reasons why I decided to change this part of the lesson; I value teamwork and collaboration and the work the fifth graders are doing together as a result of the book clubs and realize this would be a wonderful and motivating project for the group members to do together. “Partnerships are crucial to success in reading. Comprehension skyrockets when students talk about their books with others, even briefly. In partnerships, students have opportunities to build on others’ ideas and to express their own ideas clearly and persuasively” (http://oaklandk12-public.rubiconatalas.org). Rather than having the kids view 29 presentations at the end of this unit, they will be viewing seven presentations that are creative and one of a kind that reflect their hard work and dedication as a group. The other change I made with this particular lesson, is I gave the students ONE essential question for this presentation: What type of person is your character and why? I decided to have the students “zoom in” on character traits for this particular PowerPoint presentation so they had a certain focus. Due to the new introduction of this technology resource, I didn’t want the overall lesson to be too complicated. It is crucial students be aware of the lesson objective and learning targets so they know the expectations and can be successful in their learning. I began the reading workshop lesson with our read aloud, Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo with my fifth graders and we had a wonderful discussion about “Character Traits” and what those words mean and the differences between character traits and physical traits. We generated an ongoing list of character traits using precise words. I asked my fifth graders to think about their own character traits and many were eager to share examples with the class. We had a wonderful discussion and I shared some examples of character traits of students in the class. This is just a brief description of how the lesson began. Over the course of three weeks, the students added to an anchor chart with character trait descriptors, learned HOW to identify character traits based on character’s thoughts, actions, and dialogue in the story, participated in higher-order thinking within book club and whole class discussions, provided evidence for thinking, created character webs based on character traits. Each of these activities led up to the final, exciting task, which was to create a PowerPoint presentation identifying ten character traits of the main character in your book club narrative. When I introduced this project, there was literally hooting and hollering in my classroom among the fifth graders- they were so excited to be creating a PowerPoint presentation for the first time. In order to increase motivation and give kids a visual to help them understand the expectations, I showed the students an example of a slideshow that I created on the character in our class read aloud. After viewing this PowerPoint, the fifth graders were pumped to begin! I went through the PowerPoint tutorial step-by-step and I made sure to have directions displayed on the projector and also an individual hard copy for each student to reference throughout the project. There are many advantages to using technology in the classroom and in this particular lesson, the main advantage with implementing technology for this character lesson, was the ability for me to easily differentiate instruction. Teaching the kids to use PowerPoint went much more smoothly than I had anticipated, but it was important for me to be organized with my instruction and tutorial of HOW to use it and the different features available. Some students were content with creating a more simple presentation, whereas others were up for a challenge and created presentations with all the bells and whistles (as they say). I also found it beneficial that the boys and girls created these PowerPoints with book club members, and had the ability to converse and ask questions of one another, encouraging substantive conversation and higher-order thinking skills. The students were thrilled to be able to share their presentations with the class, and it pushed them to create even higher quality presentations knowing they would have an audience. In this lesson and throughout this character unit, technology only enhanced student learning, the delivery of the content, and the overall outcome of the lesson.