During the first week of this term my first art lesson for PLG release was recorded so I could watch and reflect on it with my coach and mentor Michelle.
Overall I thought the lesson went pretty well, but once I had watched it and talked through it with Michelle I quickly realised two main things that I think I really need to improve and make changes with.
Firstly and quite importantly, the students ended up sitting for a a huge amount of time. At the time I thought that my enthusiasm for what we were discussing would transfer to the kids and the time sitting and discussing the rainforest was justified, however, when you totalled up the amount of time that the kids were siting for, it equaties to over 20 minutes which is too much time.
My purpose for the discussion was to introduce the children to the rainforest and it's animals, and give them some prior knowledge before enabling the time to research and choose an animal they would like to draw for their artwork. However I realised watching the video that I doubled up with creating some prior knowledge with the kids. I firstly had quite an in-depth discussion with the kids about what they knew about rainforests. It was here that I should of shared the picture book and discussed the illustrators artwork. Instead I then sent the kids off to do more research and then we spent more time sharing this back as a whole group. Michelle and I discussed here that often when children share back as a whole class, it is often just the teacher and the person sharing who are giving the discussion their full attention. The rest of the group often switch off. Am a little frustrated at myself as I know this, and when I had a class full time i used a wide range of strategies to enable students to brainstorm and to set the scene for a new focus and for also sharing back knowledge that had been discovered. I think i've perhaps got a bit lazy and it is timely for me to relook and perhaps do a little researching and thinking into how I introduce topics to students and get students to share back learning with the group.
secondly I realised that I spent a great deal of time discussing the rainforest and the animals found in the rainforest. However, I now question my reasoning for this as the focus of the lessons is about creating a chalk drawing of a rainforest animal. The time would have been much better used exploring drawing techniques for drawing their chosen animal and experimented with the chalk pastels.
These were the notes that came out of our discussion:
Observation:
Elyisa identified the following areas as a focus for the analysis of the recorded lesson:
- Questioning
- Teacher directed learning
- Amount of time students are spending sitting on the mat
- Voice projection above students
Outcomes
- Mat time -the students time spend sitting is not necessary. Elysia to try other ways of supporting students to gather knowledge and get started on their learning.
- Michelle to give Elysia a professional reading from Teaching in the Fast Lane Suzy Pepper-Rollins.
- Sharing back time Elysia to consider ways of making this engaging for all learners.
- Teacher talk time- discussed the amount of scaffolding and support given to students. Get students to indicate they know what to do or strategies to use if they don’t know what to do.
- Record next week’s lesson for own viewing to see if teacher actions are changing.
After reflecting on all of this I would like to make some positive changes to what I had planned to do for the next lesson this coming Thursday to try and make improvements on the first lesson. My focus for this lesson was originally to give time for the students to have a play and experiment with the chalk pastels. I want to have a look over my plan and review how long I had originally planned for the students to be sitting and listening, and make sure it isn't for too long. They majority of the lesson should be for the kids to work on their piece of artwork.
Will also have a read of the article given to me by Michelle and see if there are some key pointers I can use to achieve my goals.
