More Videos for Teachers p. 6
5th Grader Plays Teacher: Announces Honor Roll (1:40)
This young lady has some guts! She handed out our honor roll certificates at our latest assembly in front of about 300 parents, students, and teachers. Why not? How could I pass up an opportunity to develop leadership and public speaking skills in my kids? Perhaps it's not as special for the award recipients to have their names announced by a peer instead of the teacher. However, it is my opinion that the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages. This gal will never forget today's awards assembly.
Constructivist Writing Lesson (23:31)
This video documents a three day writing lesson where 4th and 5th grade students became the writing teachers in 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms. Below you will find a complete discription of the steps involved in this lesson.
Introduction
The first lesson introduces students to the steps of the unit. My 4th and 5th grade students will become teachers of lower grade classes in teams of 2 or 3 students. Each team will receive a class set of writing samples. The team will analyze the students' writing and determine the needs of the class. They will then develop a one hour lesson to help these students improve their writing skills. The goals of the unit include: developing writing skills, improve ability to analyze writing, fostering critical thinking, improve leadership and speaking abilities, learn problem solving, encourage team building and social skills, and much more!
In the first part of the video, you will see me introduce the unit. The entire video is just a snapshot of the actual lessons. We spent about 2 hours a day for three straight days on this unit. I spent many weeks prior to this unit developing the students' skills necessary to do a project like this.
Step 1: Analyze Writing Samples
This part of the video shows students working together to analyze student writing samples. In this step students try to determine the greatest need of the students.
Special Note: Initiative!
Notice in the video one of the benefits of teaching students with this method: students take charge of their own learning. At one point a team uses a dictionary to check student spelling...all on their own! I never even mentioned using a dictionary, nor did they ask first. They just intuitively knew that they needed to be accurate when teaching real live kids how to spell. This was not the only team that pulled out a dictionary.
The Teacher as Coach
In part of step one you will see me coaching students in the middle of their analysis process. As I worked the room, I noticed many teams going slightly astray, so I stopped them with 2 bells and clarified a couple of points.
Step 2: Teacher Training
Tym, our class leader of the week, leads a discussion about what good teachers do. The students take notes. One student takes notes with her paper under the document camera. This step provides students with the tools necessary to teach their lessons and feel successful. It also makes kids appreciate their teachers a lot more! I presented this after the students had generated their own list of about 11 good teacher behaviors.
Step 3: Prepare the Lesson
Here students work in their teams to plan their lesson. I gave them a simple lesson plan format to help guide their planning. This format included the following:
What is your objective?
What rules will you state?
How will you teach the objective?
How will you involve ALL students?
What will you assign all students to do?
Step 4: Practicing the Lesson
Next the students practiced teaching their lessons. If a team felt like they were totally prepared to teach, they were directed to join another practicing team and play the role of the students. This way, all team members stayed engaged and learning throughout the practice session. Eventually, there were only a couple of teams practicing and all the others were playing student roles and giving feedback to the "teachers."
Step 5: Pre-lesson Conference
Team members met with the classroom teachers for about 10 minutes prior to teaching the actual lesson. Meanwhile, I supervised the 2nd and 3rd graders in a free play activity on the playground. When the students were prepared to begin teaching, the adult teachers came to the playground and picked up their classes.
Step 6: Teach the Lesson
Finally, the students got to teach their lessons that they had been working so hard on. As they taught, I ran from room to room (7 in all) to do a little observing and shoot some video.
Step 7: Reflect
The kids were buzzing when they returned to class after their being teachers for an hour! We spent some time in free discussion sharing how things went. Then, we took some time to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each lesson. The students worked in their teams to generate some notes on what went well and what they would like to improve upon next time. I then posed some reflection questions to the whole class. Many students realized they would never want to be a teacher and others decided that they DID want to become teachers. It seems all of the students gained a new appreciation for the art of teaching. I've also noticed that the students seem to be better students as a result of their teaching experience. They more readily recognize their own need to learn and appreciate the hard work that goes into preparing a lesson for students.