Instructional Decision Making

Example 1:
The second lesson did not go as planned. I often find have a difficult time sticking to transition
times within my lesson, especially when I feel students have not fully grasped the important concepts
during any one portion, which was the case during the second lesson. When students moved to the tables
to examine the mystery documents, it was clear that students needed more specific direction to be able to
be successful at the task I had given them. Although I had just briefly modeled an example of noticing a
detail Its cloudy outside. and how a natural I wonder statement might be I wonder if its going to
rain, it wasnt nearly enough. I was trying to scaffold the learning, using more common vocabulary of
notice and wonder instead of explicit and infer as we developed the idea of connecting what we can see to
ideas about what we can see, but I could see that many students were not grasping it. Many of the
students had questions about what they were supposed to do. Some students just sat and stared at the
mystery documents, without writing and without even much talking amongst their group, which is the
exact opposite reaction I thought I would get from putting students in small groups, asking them to act
like detectives, and having the examine a mystery document.
Due to these unexpected circumstances, I knew I needed to be flexible in adjusting my plans on
the fly to try and salvage the activity if I wanted them to make real progress towards meeting LG1 and
LG2. I decided to pause the activity and provide modeling that was more transferable to the expectations
of the task. I projected the chart mystery document, that students were mostly just staring at, with the
document camera so that the whole class could see without having to leave their seats and lose more class
time. I modeled talking myself through the process and not stopping at one thing (I notice that on the
left side of the chart the numbers start at 1630 and end at 1770. I notice there is a pattern. The numbers
increase by twenty each time. I also notice that on the right side of the chart there doesnt seem to be a
pattern and the numbers get very large, very quickly.). Just then, I realized only noticing one thing about
this particular mystery document would not be very much to go on for my students. They hadnt yet built
through our work - and hadnt come into the unit with - sufficient background knowledge to make
connections about the numbers on the mystery document, and although the task was meant to be
cognitively challenging, it might be too early to expect them to meet the learning goals without more
dynamic visuals. This was confirmed by students having the most success recording a variety of relevant
I Notice statements for the mystery document that was a picture, as compared to the map, timeline, and
chart.
After I finished modeling, I had the students return to the activity, but the overall pace in
producing statements was still tedious. Students were also recording inferences instead of explicit details
in the I Notice column, like for the picture of a Native American, a student wrote, It takes place in
colonial times. While this is an inference I hope students to have, I want them to be able to differentiate
between explicit and inferred information when they are categorizing on their graphic organizers, because
the point of the graphic organizer is to be able to see information. I made the decision not to assign
grades to the graphic organizer because I felt like I did not prepare students adequately enough to be
achieve the learning target.
As follow up, I modified the start of the next days lesson to include an in-depth review of the
learning targets for the day in an effort to provide greater clarity of expectations. I also knew that Lesson
3 began using more complex and unfamiliar terminology, so I made sure to spend time targeting and
clarifying the terms that we would be using going forward (explicit and inferred) to refer to information in
text and visuals. As a whole group, we created a T-chart and students contributed to helping write
explanations for each term in each column. I drew an eye next to explicit as a visual cue or reminder that
you can see explicit information in the text or visual, and a thought cloud, a plus sign, and an eye next to
inferred, as a visual cue that we use our background knowledge and combine it with what we see to make
inferences. After flipping the chart paper so that students could no longer refer to it, I asked students to
turn to their reading partner and define explicit and inferred in their own words. I asked several students
to share how their partner had defined explicit and inferred, to check for understanding. All three students
shared a valid interpretation. Then I flipped back to our T-chart and we read the definitions we had
constructed in unison to help students build fluency. The lesson asked for students to look at a visual with
elements that were more familiar to them (a farmer plowing a garden) instead of the more abstract charts,
graphs, and timelines. The lesson went much smoother than the previous day as I observed more
engaged, confident students. Almost all students were able to hit the learning goals for the day and I
believe my modifications directly improved their progress. I decided that going forward I would dedicate
more time to checking for understanding at the beginning of my lessons, including students understanding
of expectations for activities and key vocabulary.
Example 2:
Before giving the pre-assessments (questionnaire and K-W of the KWL chart) I was considering
making groups homogeneous (grouping students with similar ability levels) because I predicted that there
would be a significant gap in background knowledge between the higher performing students and the
lower performing students. The results of the pre-assessments showed this was clearly not the case. Only
three students demonstrated having a semblance of accurate background knowledge and two of those
students were not among the top third of my class in regard to overall academic performance levels.
Based on the pre-assessment results, I decided that all students would benefit from heterogeneous
groupings because the data suggested that most students had little to no accurate background knowledge
of Colonial America. Since several of the activities I planned were cognitively demanding (Blooms:
applying, analyzing, creating) and lessons were scaffolded to higher-level thinking, I knew that my lower
ability level students would benefit from high ability level students modeling their thinking as the
interacted with content. During the course of the mini-unit, higher ability level students were able to do
just that, as I observed their interactions. Lower ability level students performed better on assessments
where the work was fully or partially completed during group work than independently, and also
completed their work at a faster pace (they were stuck less).
I believe that this was a positive instructional modification because 15 out 17 students ended up
meeting all learning goals within the mini-unit. The higher ability students benefited from have
opportunities to orally share the rationales for their inferences with their lower ability level peers. Lower
ability level students benefited from having higher ability level students help share reading
responsibilities for challenging informational text, aiding their comprehension of the text and leading to
greater success identifying critical information. It also kept my expectations of Based on the evidence of
success of the students when placed in heterogeneous groupings, I will continue to use this instructional
strategy to benefit all students.