Reflective Essay On Trail Choices

On March 24th I taught a social studies lesson to a 4th grade class. The lesson started out well with me telling the students at the beginning of the lesson what we would be doing during our social studies lesson. However, I noticed I did not elaborate on my expectations for learning, so it wasn’t clear what the students were expected to know by the end of the lesson. For example, I said, "Today we are going to talk about the pioneers’ last trail decision as you head west." The students knew what we were going to be doing, as they had completed trail decisions before, but it wasn’t really clear exactly what the trail decision was going to be about and how it affected the pioneers. The students were not excited about doing the trail decision because they knew there would be a lot of writing involved and I …show more content…
I asked the students to “turn to the person you are sitting next to and discuss what think”. I also had the students discuss in small groups. I saw most of the students participating and discussing with one another about the lesson and this made me realize how beneficial it is to have different ways to engage in a lesson so students are leaning in different ways and things are moving and changing, which keeps leaning exciting and active. There are things I could have added, however. I could have had more whole group discussion after the students had participated in small group and partner discussions. This way other students could hear what the other groups had discussed and come up with, which would have added to the students’ learning. I also could have written down what I heard the students discussing so the students could see what else had been discussed. This might have helped students who were struggling with the content and met their learning needs by letting them see and hear. Those students may have been able to then add more to the