Texts And Tasks Growth

The first video is a lesson I did towards the beginning of my student teaching year. I was starting to get into grading their Article of the Week’s and they were just finishing up their summer reading essays. What I had noticed in their AoW’s was that some students were excluding words in sentences. What that did was make it harder for me to understand what it was they were saying unless I reread and took in the context, and even then it was hard. So what I did then was take the data I was given from their AoW’s and I created a lesson that would help them understand what the impact of missing words in their writing has. I used a technology tool called nearpod so that my students could participate in the lesson and it would show up on the screen for them to see. The outcome or goal was not based on a specific writing standard but can be tied to the grammar and structure standards for writing in 9-10. The lesson aimed to give students the opportunity to hear what it sounded like when there are missing words and ways that they could avoid that in the future. This lesson created a task for students and did little to modify any text or tasks for the students in order to help them with the intended outcome. The lesson was minimally effective in assessing and modifying texts and tasks for a specific learning outcome. The second video is more recent, recorded April of 2019 in the last few weeks of student teaching. This lesson was getting the students introduced to poetry. We had state testing the next two days of class so the lesson was simple and only required them to take notes and then look up definitions. The outcome or goal for this lesson was to have students identify vocabulary terms that were unknown to them or ones they had a limited understanding of and then work on getting stronger with those terms. We used a technique of color coding the vocab terms. The students before have used colored pencils or markers to indicate the level (red, yellow or green) that they correspond with that term. This time I just had students label the category and determine which category the term best fit: red was they had no clue what the term meant, yellow was they had heard the term before but was unsure of the definition, and green was they could tell me the definition and give me an example. Modifying the traditional way of giving

students vocab terms, to look up and write down the definition for me to later check in and give them a grade, students are then able to spend their time working only on the terms they find they need the most help with. We had been working with a lot of the vocabulary on their list throughout the whole year, and so in an effort to limit the workload on the students that would be fruitless for them to do, I had them only find the definitions for the terms in their yellow and red categories. It creates less cognitive load and keeps their time productive and not wasteful.