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Renee Dumbadse-Carlomagno
EDUC5180
Golden
11/9/15
Practice Lesson Written Report
My practice lesson took place at 9:00am on October 23, 2015 at Old
Adobe Elementary School in Petaluma, Ca. Overall, the lesson was a
positive experience, student participation was excellent, and the lesson
flowed seamlessly. I believe that my previous experiences in teaching
my own preschool and after school classes benefitted my execution of
the lesson. Moving forward, I do have some ideas to progress as an
educator and shape my teaching methods when working with
elementary grade levels.
The first take away for myself post-lesson is that I believe my task
stream lesson plan contained too many details on paper for the
average day-to-day lesson. I would like to narrow down my sequence of
activities section. Prior to the lesson, I felt as though I would rather
have too much, than too little information. After this experience, I
realized that I work best when I am not chained to a piece of paper to
determine my next move. I found myself abandoning the papers
shortly into the lesson, because I work best when I can acknowledge
that I know what I have planned and I put my focus into what the
students need on that given day. Moments after putting the lesson plan

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to the side, I felt myself relax into the activity. Another great take-away
from this experience was that I learned that I need some practice using
IPads. I found it difficult at times to properly display the students work
on the front TV screen because the image would flip upside down. My
supervisor expressed that this was not necessarily a bad thing,
because I was able to laugh about it and this aspect of the lesson
made me appear to be more human. Moving forward, I plan on
borrowing my moms IPad occasionally to better familiarize myself with
this technology.
Next, the ELL and special needs students received one-on one
attention while I circulated through the classroom. The students were
also seated toward the front of the classroom in appropriate and
supportive table groups. My understanding of their exact needs was
fairly limited despite my attempts to access information. For my next
practice lesson, I hope better understanding of the students specific
levels and challenges. This will allow me to scaffold and make more
modifications if necessary.
My lesson allowed me to monitor student understanding through
discussions and observations. I enjoyed seeing the variety of methods
students used to achieve their answers. The students were very
focused and ultimately were able to articulate how they came to their
answers. I believe that using turn and talk and allowing students to
work in groups of two gave the students more confidence to share their

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process with the class. The most challenging part going into the lesson
was my limited understanding of the ability levels, what the students
have been taught, and how they have been taught to solve math
problems. Because of this, I took a step back at times in order to really
observe and attempt to understand some methods that the students
were using that are new and unfamiliar to me. I feel like this gave the
students a chance to teach and empowered them to know that there
are many ways to achieve the answer. I shared my process and many
of the students shared theirs, it was a wonderful dialogue. I believe
that even when teaching my own class, I would like to continue to
present the material in this way because I think it was a positive
experience for the students.
Based on my observation of this class the learning outcomes for the
lesson were met. The majority of the students were able to represent
multi-step multiplication word problems using a letter to represent the
unknown or missing number. Also, students were able to apply the use
of mental math and other strategies covered prior to the lesson.
Although a few students displayed difficulty with multiplication, the
majority of the students were able to apply prior understanding of
single step multiplication when solving for multi-step multiplication
problems. I believe that with a second exposure to solving multi-step
multiplication word problems and appropriate scaffolding for a few
students, all students in this class will be able to master this concept.

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I think this lesson further confirmed the fact that I love teaching. I am
confident that this is what I was meant to do with my life. It felt good to
see the light bulb moment exhibited by the students. I didnt want the
lesson to end because I was enjoying the process. Upon finishing the
activity, unprompted, the entire class thanked me. My supervisor Kathy
said that was the first time she has ever seen that happen! Kathys
feedback was very positive and she mentioned the same things I
noticed and explained previously in regard to the technology. Her tone
was positive and she said it was the best first lesson she has seen. It
felt good to hear that from Kathy because I respect her advice and
opinions. I am looking forward to next semester because I know that I
will have many opportunities to continue to improve my skills as a
teacher.