Department of Teacher Education & Learning Sciences

Elementary Education Program

Formal Observation Reflection

Directions: Complete the reflection questions and submit your response to your observer prior to having a post-
conference to discuss the observation. If a conference is held immediately after the observation you will submit
your responses to the observer the following day via email.

Name: Maura Murphy Date: November 16, 2017

1. To what extent were learning outcomes appropriate and achievable to your

students?
We wanted the students in our class to recognize the importance of our names and
how they are a part of what makes them unique, and they demonstrated their
understanding of this very well during our read aloud and sharing discussion.
2. How effective were your instructional strategies? What changes would you
make in your instructional approaches if you taught this lesson again? Why?
Our instructional strategies were effective and helped us complete the lesson as we
planned. I think it went pretty smoothly, but if we did it again we would probably
change our strategies during our sharing/discussion to make it run a little smoother.
Instead of letting the students hold their papers that they made, we would collect them
and call them up to the front of the circle one at a time. When each student held their
paper, they got distracted and were not always listening to the person sharing.
3. Evaluate the effectiveness of your oral and written communication with
students. (Consider how well you communicated learning objectives, clarity of directions, use of
standard English, quality of questions and effectiveness of discussion techniques.)

I think that I did a good job of asking important questions during the read aloud,
especially when I noticed students starting to get distracted. I also tried to be clear in
my instructions and made sure to try to make all students feel comfortable while
sharing about their names and thanking each of them for sharing.
4. Evaluate the level of student engagement in your lesson . (Consider how you presented
the content/skills, the activities and assignments for students, grouping of students, and structure and
pacing of the lesson.)

Students were very engaged during our lesson. They listened and answered questions
thoughtfully during the read-aloud and all participated in our group sharing of what
their names meant.
5. How effectively did you use instructional materials, resources, and/or
technology?
We used our materials, resources, and technology effectively. We used iPads to look
up students names to find the meanings, used our book during our read aloud, and
had the papers for the projects prepared in advance.
6. To what extent were your assessment strategies effective? What changes would
you make in your assessment approach if you taught this lesson again? Why?
 Our assessment ended up being more informal than we originally intended, so if we
did this lesson again, we would probably have a time for students to reflect on what
they learned and write a sentence or two about the importance of their names and
something they learned about someone else in the class. This would help students
understand that the message was of the lesson was not just to learn about their own
name, but to hear more about their classmates names and culture.
7. To what extent was your feedback to students accurate, substantive,
constructive, specific, and/or timely?
Most of our feedback involved thanking students for sharing about their names and
sharing the drawing that they made. We wanted to focus on feedback that would help
build our classroom community and we think that it worked well.
8. To what extent did the classroom management and environment contribute to
student learning? (Consider your classroom procedures, your use of physical space, and the
students conduct.)

For the read-aloud, in the beginning of the lesson we established that their job as
listeners was to think about how they would feel if they were in the same situation as
the main character. We did this so that they could learn and reflect about how
important respect is. We also made sure that students were listening to each other
during our discussion to ensure that they were learning about each other and
implementing what they learned from reading the book.
9. Did you make modifications to your lesson plan during the lesson? If so, what
were they and what motivated these changes?
The only modification we made to the lesson plan was to do a less formal assessment,
where we just observed students behavior and attitudes during the discussion. We felt
that it was easy to see that they had learned what we wanted them to because they
were demonstrating respect as they listened.
10. Was your Teaching Behavior Focus goal met?
Yes, it was. We wanted to make sure that our classroom management was positive
and appropriate and we think we did a pretty good job of being conscious of making
sure that happened.