Week 13 Reflection

November 16th - 20th, 2009

Sometimes it can be a futile effort to plan detailed lessons when a school break is on the horizon. Absences are more likely, the students that are there begin sinking into vacation-mode, Plus, there's always the worry that students may forget material over a long period of time, so units are usually planned to end before them. Thanksgiving break begins after school Friday, so we just had the students review, take a test, and watch the movie that's based on "Flowers for Algernon". Plus, Mrs. Chico left for a conference for the last three days of the week.

As I was planning the lessons for the week, I was having trouble coming up with ideas for after our literature unit were over. Unfortunately, the final test fell on a Wednesday, so I had two extra days worth of planning. The movie took up most of both periods, so I decided to make a mini-lesson on sentence structure for my action research. I noticed that the students definitely need the practice after reading their personal narratives: there were run-on sentences and missing commas in almost every paper. But after my host teacher read my lesson plans, she reminded me not to make up lessons that don't fit naturally. She explained that students will see this as busy work if it doesn't connect and won't take it seriously. If they don't put enough effort into the work, the teacher won't get the most accurate results from the students.

And it was true. I almost felt guilty teaching the lesson because I kept thinking it was poorly connected. I even started to believe that teaching sentence structure wasn't necessary, too. When the teacher is in that mindset, the students will sense it (and that's why our action research professors always stressed how important it is to keep your AR within the natural flow of the classroom). So I could sense the apathy in the students, especially considering they did poorly on the assessment. I am definitely going to start working on how to keep my lessons connected and to prove the relevance of the subject to the students.