Assessment of Our Reading Strategies Lesson

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Teaching today's reading strategies lesson was a great experience. For the first time, I had the opportunity to actually teach a lesson to a class rather than simply present information from a power point. Through the delivery of the lesson and the reflections of my classmates I was able to learn a lot. Though I thought the lesson went very well, we omitted some vital aspects of a powerful lesson. Most notably, there were no models of what we expected the students to do. In planning the lesson, I had difficulties figuring out how to model the strategies without giving too much assistance.  As Dr. Edge suggested, we could/should have provided examples of our expectations to the strategy by pulling them from another text. A text that we are all familiar with would have been the most effective. Some of the suggestions made by peers to better the lesson were to allow the students to develop their thoughts more thoroughly. Whether it was Craig or myself, we had apparently been cutting off students to redirect their thoughts to better align with our expectations. We certainly learned the difficulties in regards to wait time.

But there were several things I felt we did very well. First off, we provided each group with a different article to read which they then taught to the class. This method was very well received. Also, I felt that all three strategies were suitable for the lesson. We were both told that we projected our voices well and that our visits with the students while they were working were appropriate and helped prompt topics of discussion.  I thoroughly enjoyed teaching the three reading strategies through texts of Industrial Revolution articles and am excited to try out new reading strategies in the future.