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As an education candidate at West Virginia State University, I have developed an understanding of seizing the moments to enhance learning opportunities for my students through flexibility and responsiveness. To demonstrate my strong ability to recognize these unique opportunities, I wanted to show my videos from my EDUC 426 Unit Plan, "Variations of Traits," which show two separate videos, two examples in which I can show how my responsiveness to the events changed the outcomes for my lesson. I have also provided photo evidence of the results of the class accumulation of the placements of the traits we sorted, as well as the Day Two lesson observation evaluation that was recorded by Mr. Ed Rider and the education supervisor at WVSU, who helped address changes that needed to be adjusted for the third lesson, which addresses the discussed idea of doing "slap it!" The second video is of the vocabulary in Day Two, which provided a solid discussion about the defining terms. Still, the misconceptions could have been clearer: students struggled with the content, and I had to spend extra time bringing the level of my content down for my students' comprehension. This was not anticipated as expected at first, but it was addressed in the evaluation as well, and each day, I made progress in closing the comprehension gaps for all students.

 

In the first videos, this interactive instruction activity was designed to meet the student object: "By the end of the unit, the students will use evidence and rationale to support the explanation that the environment can influence traits." I could assess students formatively while they played this game and listened to the rationale behind placing the game pieces in the categories of the T-Chart I designed for the class to earn their team points. The moments that made this particular lesson stand out as an example of flexibility and responsiveness were when the student's behavior was becoming undesirable and the engagement in the back of the line was becoming an issue. It is noticeable in parts of this video which led to a change in how to proceed with my lesson. The current arrangement for students standing in the front of the classroom was not working out as well as planned, and the recommendation from my cooperating teacher that we could work from seats and transition to the board may be a suggestion that ended up being a solution to solve a problem that we had.

 

After the third time stopping the class, I knew that this was going in a direction the students could not handle. My initial thought was to sit the students down on the floor, but the best solution came as a recommendation. I tried this, and it was successful. With my guidance, we stood up and returned to our seats. Students had to take responsibility for their placement in line with the order they were placed before being sat down and remember which team they were assigned to. This transition made the pace of the learning activity more engaging, for most students were actively paying attention to their peers at the front of the classroom now and listening. The pace of the game picked up, and this was a learning moment I will not forget. It is an example that I can use the flexibility of a lesson to respond to an issue and maintain lesson objectives for students' academic learning success even when things look like they are not going well!

 

The secondary video exemplifies building on students' knowledge and clearing misconceptions using responsiveness. I asked a question, "What is a trait?" I received several remarks; one to notice was a boy saying it is something passed down from the parents, and that is not wrong, but it is not entirely correct in the statement. Hence, as we continued to get more information to build off this answer and others, students started to understand what a 'trait' was. It sparked that metacognitive thinking to piece together multiple pieces of information with our dialog to form these answers. One girl can hear anxiously trying to guess the answer and then trying to read the answer off the board, but she is unable to read the word 'characteristics,' so we had to learn what that is for her to understand the meaning of a characteristic. One another boy says the colors of the plants are 'green and purple.' You hear it in her voice as she realizes, "Those are the traits they have." I was so excited to listen to the answer and then define the word and clear up that one boy was correct that there are inherited traits! This is a way to develop interactions between students to respect each other and their answers to build on the responses to find a correct answer in a collaborative whole, group meaningful discussion.

3e: Demonstrating Flexibility and Response

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 Darren Ray Goodwin

West Virginia State University Elementary Education Major

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