Practicum II Lesson 1 Reflection
My first observation for my P2 placement took place on Wednesday morning from 8:30-9:30. It was a wacky day because there was a school-wide rally for “Pink Day” (anti-bullying day), and station time was flipped with opening procedures for the morning. I taught a language arts lesson that overall went very well. I taught levelized groups, and we talked about how to differentiate instruction within the levelized groups by attending to specific student needs. This comes from knowing what the students individually need to work on by having discussions with Margie on academic focuses for each student. We talked about how Kami was at a much lower level than the rest of the students in the top group, and how she needs some specific one-on-one attention to build her confidence in her reading abilities and to teach her core reading strategies such as decoding and context clues. Margie and I had a discussion about specific students in the levelized groups on Friday, and after testing has been completed on students we decided to make a few students and move a few students into a higher levelized group and a few students into a lower levelized group in hopes that they will be more successful. Kami was one of the students that we decided to move to a lower levelized group as we felt that she would be more successful with students at her level because being with students at a higher level was not encouraging her to rise to their level but was rather discouraging her in her abilities and making her fall farther behind. We also discussed strategies to successfully lead transitions between stations, which included learning songs and refocusing strategies to capture student attention, holding student expectations to a high level, and making sure that students were actually frozen during “Cheetah Freeze”.