ED 315 Video Description:

This was my fourth and last field placement at Alverno. It was in a fifth grade
classroom at Whittier Elementary, a small MPS charter school. This class had
twenty diverse kids with all different developmental levels. In this field, I taught
seven math lessons and one social studies lesson. This video demonstrates my
ability to differentiate instruction to meet the needs of diverse learners. In this field,
my cooperating teacher had a method for meeting the needs of all the learners and
I carried it through my lessons. Not only did this create consistency for the
students, but it helped me to direct my instruction. In my video you will notice that
there is a group of students sitting at a kidney bean shaped table. That was on
purpose because she was able to have the students with extra needs when it comes
to math sitting closer to her. That way when she was teaching, she could see their
papers and intervene if needed. I followed suit because the students were used to
it and it helped me to better monitor the class. For this math lesson the objective
was students will be able to solve everyday situations (real world word problems)
involving fractions through multiplication or division.
To actively engage the students I handed them each an individual white board
and a marker. After we did examples of how to distinguish the operations as a
class, I put a word problem up on the board and the students wrote on the white
board what operation they thought it was. They held the boards up and this allowed
me to informally assess the students to see where they were at. After I took a
glance of their understanding, I had a student who I saw with the correct operation
share to the class how they figured it out. Then I summed it up. That way students
were able to hear the explanation from a peer, they turned and talked with a peer
and then they heard my reiteration. This math class is set up as a math workshop,
so after the twenty minute lesson students went into their workshops for forty-five
minutes. This allowed for differentiation because at this time students who were
working at a middle school math level went on the program, ALEKS. The other
students had a review worksheet on past lessons, a worksheet on todays material,
and then online math through math games. During this time I walked around
checking on students and worked closely with others.
The theory that drove my lesson was Don Holdaways theory of Demonstration,
Participation, Practice, and Performance. Students were able to see thinking aloud
with explanations for choosing certain operations, they participated in their learning
through the white boards and turn and talks, they practiced through online math
games, and they performed through the worksheets. This gave students numerous
chances to be engaged in the material, learn it, and ask questions. Also, they were
able to learn from a more expert other which works for both students. One student
is learning from another and one student is solidifying their understanding through
explanation.
This lesson was taught consecutively with another. Based off of the information
that I gathered from this lesson and student understanding, I adjusted my lesson for
the following day. Through assessment, I saw that students would benefit from
further explanation and spending more time on it the next day. The next day I

created a real world problem and brought in Starbursts to show students that when
we solve a problem, we should look at the answer and ask ourselves if it makes
sense. We not only looked at the correct way to solve the problem, but also the
wrong way to ask ourselves would that make sense if we left it as our answer. This
worked much better and students were able to see the application of distinguishing
operations much more clearly.