Video Blog #2: Lesson on Graphs Grade 7

The activity students were doing in this video was creating a story based off of a graph given to them by the teacher. The students were to see how the two variables interacted with each other. The teacher then also had students look at sequences. They were suppose to be able to see how functions are made.

Lesson Analysis 1: Identify several strategies the teacher used to orchestrate and promote student discourse in this lesson.
During the lesson the teacher would try to rephrase questions that students did not understand the first time around. She also would try to make the problems more relatable to them. She would turn the situation around to put them in it so they could think through the problem more easily. The teacher also did a good job of breaking the problem down even more. Rather then focusing on the whole overall solution she broke down where the students were getting confused so that then they could understand the whole problem.

Reflective Task 1: What specific actions could the teacher have taken to improve the effectiveness of learning when students are working in groups?
The teacher stated in her interview after the lesson that she allowed students to pick their own groups, so they were working with their friends. To improve the effectiveness of learning in the groups she could have assigned them their groups in a different manner. She stated that she does this usually but took a risk in letting them work with their friends. Another way to improve it would be to have some of the higher level thinkers with the lower level thinkers so they could maybe help teach each other. It would also help for her to walk around the room while they are working in their groups to make sure they are staying on task and getting the most they can out of the activity.

Reflective Task 2: Describe how the teacher's questioning, and the manner in which student responses are handled, contribute or do not contribute to a positive classroom learning environment?
I thought the questioning the teacher did was a good way of getting students to follow the process they should. She asked building questions so that their knowledge continued to grow. I thought the way student responses were handled did not contribut much to a positive learning environment. Students would just shout out answers and no acknowledgement was made on the correct answer or who made it. If a student did not know the answer to the question I do not think they would have been able to pick it up. One way that there was a positive impact is that she did not negatively respond to any of the responses she did hear. This would help students to feel more confident in trying to answer more questions.

I thought this video was very interesting to watch. It seemed that the teacher had a good understanding of how to build on knowledge students already had. I found it very interesting to see how in depth her lesson plan was and all the different aspects of it. She did not keep the students doing the same task the entire class period which helped to keep the students attention. I think I would be able to use the information from this video in my own classroom someday.