As a teacher candidate at West Virginia State University, I fully understand what is required of an educator. I know the content; Science is a strength of mine, scoring 174 on the Praxis II 5002 Science Sub Test. In self-reflection, I often find myself learning from my mistakes. However, when I see myself performing this remarkable learning feature, it is through meaningful discussion or learning through doing. I still learn best by the same ideals of John Dewey with the "learn by doing" educational philosophy (Pappas, 2023). Learning through experimenting and applying real-life experiences was my intended strategic goal with instruction for my unit plan, "Variations of Traits." For my evidence, I have provided my unit plan for "Variation of Traits," my teacher-made pre-assessment, the student's work from the second-day formative assessment "Similarities and Differences," a video of "Day Two" showing my applications of adaption to address misconceptions of academic vocabulary by reviewing the discussion of vocabulary words to clear misconceptions, and photos of the gallery of plants used in the "Gallery Walk" and discussion which the students are in real-world connections to, they grew many of these plants in our class. ​​

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The lesson plan attached was a learning experience as I strived for excellence, demonstrating my content knowledge and pedagogy. Being organized and prepared is the most effective way to prove my abilities. I want to share my experience with the "Variations of Traits" unit plan from the EDUC 426 course I taught during my Residency One placement. In this lesson, I believe everything on the paper looked terrific. I wrote a beautifully blended learning STEM lesson that meets NGSS standards and incorporates cooperative learning and higher levels of Depth of Knowledge in creating an experiment and formulating questions to develop a hypothesis. The objectives were clear, the students understood what we would learn, and I had great discussions with the students and made connections to real life, especially our classroom plants. However, although I taught to the content standards, this was an issue because I used academic vocabulary that the students did not understand, had MISCONCEPTIONS and DIFFICULTIES and could not read words like characteristics, hypothesis, environment, influence, similarities, and differences. This was valuable information from the pre-assessment and my formative assessment of the class because they had been introduced to these words from my prerequisite lesson, "Patterns in Nature," and many of these words have been vocabulary words throughout this year in our reading comprehension ELA curriculum and Scholastic News. I spent a long time connecting them and what the message was trying to convey. I understand this now and have learned how to check students' comprehension levels for understanding before these units. I have adapted from this lesson and begun my lessons with a vocabulary comprehension check at each beginning. I had two students do well on my pre-assessment before teaching this lesson; one scored perfect 14/14, and the other a 10/14 when the class average score was 50.3% for the pre-assessment.

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Day one was a disaster, so I questioned myself, "Do I have what it takes to do this?" In my reflections and eating a pint of ice cream, I reviewed the data collected by Google Forms. Students' text-to-speech was not working, and I had to read the questions and this whole assessment; I felt it was terrible, but it was not. Students understood some of the questions and scored at least half correctly. That was before I even taught the lesson. I can be satisfied that I can now strive to show progress. I am telling my story now; how can I change day two to fix it appropriately to meet the student's needs? Many students knew the vocabulary words when I described the meanings of the associated words, but they could not give examples. I needed to provide more examples of traits!

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Day two was about using explicit instruction to guide learning with writing goals for learning about the scientific method; this includes learning about a hypothesis and how to write one—formulating a question about what I want to learn from this experiment. I used direct examples in my presentation, which I scaffolded to the student's level through my words by describing the meanings of words, using examples and related words so they could comprehend. This worked beautifully, and the responses were much better than on Day One! I retaught this section at the expense of using strategies with peer discussion, which I cut from my lesson. I did teach the students how to categorize their data, from separations of similarities and differences, using a group of puppies of the same litter as an example and divided the group through separation of color, fur size, face shape, tail length, eye color, and other ideas students gave me.

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My formative assessment was a cooperative learning activity shared among the students, and it was actively engaging, in which students had to discuss what they saw in the examples I gave them. I needed at least one similarity and difference from each photo. I walked around with my co-teacher and my observer, and we listened in and helped students and helped them write their ideas down. One student in particular usually does not write; he has difficulties writing and needs accommodations, and he gave me 4/6 correct answers! I stayed in his group to listen to their ideas, and they had many great conversations about the similarities and differences between a school of fish, a group of coleus plants, and a litter of puppies. These were the examples I needed for the students, with an activity that was meaningful and something they could learn from. The results from this formative assessment yield average scores of 75% in the class overall, and that is a 'C,' which means performing on the level.