D.

Anderson
Summative Evaluation
Self-Reflection Assessment

Self-Reflection Assessment for Curriculum & Strategies for the

Gifted Learner

Part 1: Question B
What have you learned about yourself as a teacher as you have experimented with new
strategies?
Through this process, I have learned that I am a teacher that learns best by doing. Even though
I have taught these strategies before in my classroom, I don’t think I truly understood them
before being asked to write my own lesson plans. Now I feel like I am much better equipped to
implement them in the way they are intended to help meet the needs of my gifted learners. The
more lessons I wrote, the easier it became. What took me hours at first, now I’m able to write a
high quality lesson in a much shorter time. I know the components of a good lesson and it’s
much easier for me to plan for them on my own.
Discuss such things as your level of comfort, how did you deal with the risk factors in trying
something new, how did you prepare your students to try something new, how much did you
include colleagues in helping you with your experiments?
For me personally, I have never really been one to shy away for trying new things. I’ve always
enjoyed the risk of going out on a limb and teaching in a way I never have before. I think that
speaks to the type of teacher that I strive to be – one that’s reflective, constantly learning, and
never complacent in her craft. So the process of learning these strategies and developing my
own lesson plans has been a really positive experience. Coming into this course, I was already
familiar with most of the strategies, apart from New American Lecture and Concept Attainment,
but I hadn’t really needed to create lessons completely on my own. I think that being asked to
write lessons for each of the strategies and implement them in my classroom is the best way to
increase my ability to teach these lessons at a higher level with my gifted learners.
Luckily for me, my students have already been exposed to lessons incorporating these strategies
either previously this school year or in years passed in their TAG classes, so there wasn’t really a
sense of learning something completely new for them as I implemented strategy lessons in my
classroom.
In terms of including colleagues with my experiments, I shared my lessons with another TAG
teacher that I teach with at a different school after I finished writing them. We are teaching
some of the same units and she was able to give me feedback on how the lesson went with her
students as well, which helped me to determine the success of my lessons.

Has anything surprised or amazed you about yourself and others who have been involved?
One thing that has surprised me through the process of developing my own lesson plans is how
the process got quicker and easier as I became more familiar with the strategies themselves and
the template used for lesson planning. When I wrote out my first lesson plan for the Six
Thinking Hats strategy, I felt like it took hours upon hours to make sure I included all the
 D.Anderson
Summative Evaluation
Self-Reflection Assessment

components of the plan, look for resources, and create documents that I would need to
implement the lesson plan. Once I got the first lesson plan turned in and out of the way, the
process of writing my own lesson plans became much more efficient. While I have always felt
that my lesson plans were detailed, the template we use for the strategies lessons forced me to be
even more descriptive, which I think is a positive. It really helped me to think through what I
wanted to include in my plan, which made me more familiar with the components of what
constitutes a lesson for gifted learners. After tackling the first plan, each new lesson got easier
and easier to write and my process was more streamlined.
Another thing that surprised me is how much I enjoyed really digging into the strategies
themselves. Since I’ve been teaching a gifted resource class since the beginning of the school
year, this was really the first time that I have truly engaged in the strategies. I’ve been
collaborating with my teammate and I’ve had the benefit of teaching some great lessons and
units that have already been developed by veteran TAG teachers, but I had never really been
forced to learn the ins and outs of each strategy and develop lesson plans on my own. I’ve come
to appreciate strategies that I previously didn’t enjoy teaching, such as metaphorical expression,
and I have become a better TAG teacher now that I really know all the strategies I’ve been using
since the start of the year.

Part 2: Strengths and Weaknesses

One area that I feel is a strength of mine would be lesson planning for gifted students,
implementation of lessons, and analysis of the results. Simply in the nature of my role, all of my
lessons, both original plans and lessons I implement that were developed for other veteran TAG
teachers, are specifically designed to be used in a resource class of gifted learners. Therefore, I
always have gifted students in mind when lesson planning. I try to make sure that all lesson
components help to develop my students into critical and creative thinkers through the use of
various activating strategies and lesson hooks, lesson activities, and reflection. After each lesson,
I informally analyze what worked and what didn’t so that I can make improvements if/when I
teach those lessons again.
Another area of strength would be adapting content to high ability learners. When planning
lessons for my gifted students, I use the Georgia Standards of Excellence as a starting point for
the topic, but I make sure that what I’m teaching goes above and beyond what they would
typically get in a traditional classroom setting. For example, while my 2nd Graders learn about
adaptations in their Science class, we focused on how polar animal species are able to survive in
the harsh climates of the Arctic and Antarctica to dig a little deeper into how adaptations help
animals survive. Moreover, we used this idea of adaptations to explore how humans effect these
ecosystems and what can happen in the future. By using the content standards as a jumping off
point, but not the end goal, I am able to create lesson plans that focus more on critical thinking
than basic content acquisition.
One area of weakness is using strategies that address the needs of multiple learning styles. I
think that when I lesson plan, I think more about how I am going to teach a particular strategy
and less about which type of learner the lesson would engage. This is something that I know I
need to work on when creating more of my own lesson plans. I think that it’s important that
each unit I teach has at least one good example of lessons that would speak to various learning
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Summative Evaluation
Self-Reflection Assessment

styles, rather than just making sure I hit each strategy. I would also like to improve how I
approach synthesis activities to offer more choice in how students show me what they know,
specifically by including choices in each learning style. I think this would go a long way to
engage a variety of learners even if the overall goal of the strategy lesson isn’t suited to their
learning style.

Part 3: Implementation of Strategies

Topic #1 = Metaphorical Expression
One of the strategy lessons that I implemented with my 3rd Grade TAG class was the
metaphorical expression lesson that I wrote about mummification. We are in the middle of a
unit on Ancient Civilizations, one of which is Ancient Egypt. Throughout the course of the unit,
students are working in expert groups for various ancient civilizations from around the world. I
wrote a metaphorical expression lesson that would fit perfectly with what my students were
already learning about that I thought would engage them in a topic they have shown interest in.
I began my lesson with a mystery picture of mummification tools, which the students absolutely
loved and had some really insightful questions and hypotheses for. After doing the mystery
photo activating strategy, we moved into the building background component of the lesson, in
which students read 2 different articles about the mummification process and completed a
Jigsaw with a partner. Since my students were also working on research projects as a unit
culminating activity, we had to cut that day short and save the remainder of the lesson for the
following week. This is both a positive and a negative. It’s a positive in the sense that they are
already familiar with the content before doing the metaphorical expression work, but it’s a
negative in the sense that the momentum is broken between activities and I had to get them
engaged again before finishing the lesson. In the future, I think I would plan the use of the
strategy lessons a little better in this unit to allow for research time in the afternoon. My lesson,
just like other unit lessons, is better suited to having a full day in order to complete all lesson
components.
Topic #2 = Six Hats
I was able to implement my Six Hats lesson on the effects of humans on Antarctica with my 2nd
Grade TAG class. This was also the lesson I used for my Extended Ticket-in-the-Door
assignment, so I have done a good bit of reflection on how the lesson went. Overall, the
implementation was very successful, but I did require more than one day to complete the
synthesis part of the lesson. I was using a digital tool that the students were unfamiliar with, so
a large chunk of time was spent going over how to use that and we needed time the following
week to finish the product itself. My biggest weakness with the six hats strategy is the Blue
Thinking Hat. I think I want it to be more creative that it really needs to be, it’s more of a
summarizing prompt, so that’s one part of my lesson that I had to change after receiving
feedback and before implementation. Students were already familiar with the six thinking hats,
so it was nice to see how effective my thinking prompts were as opposed to whether or not
students understood each different type of thinking.
Topic #3 = New American Lecture
 D.Anderson
Summative Evaluation
Self-Reflection Assessment

One strategy that I was not able to incorporate into my classroom during this course was the
New American Lecture. When we learned about this strategy in class, we learned that it is best
suited to middle and high school students. Since I teach elementary school, I felt like it would
be a bit of a stretch for my students, so I chose not to write a lesson using this strategy. If I were
to incorporate this strategy into my classroom, I think I would use it either with my 4th or 5th
Grade students. Knowing what I do now about this strategy, I could see myself using it in a
Social Studies-based unit in which students would be making sense of a good bit of content and
making connections. Based on the units available for me to teach with my older elementary
students, I might use it at the beginning of a unit like American Revolution, Conflict &
Cooperation, or some other unit like these. In order for me to use this strategy, however, I would
need to see a few more exemplars of how elementary teachers have used this strategy with their
students for me to know the best way to utilize it.