Elementary Education Program

Department of Teacher Education & Learning Sciences

Formal Observation Reflection

Directions: Complete the reflection questions and submit your response to your observer prior to
having a post-conference to discuss the observation. If a conference is held immediately after the
observation, you will submit your responses to the observer the following day via email.

Name: Kaitlyn Oakley Date: 12/4/2019

1. How effective were your instructional strategies? What changes would you make in your
instructional approaches if you taught this lesson again? Why?

I felt that our instructional strategies were effective because we held the students’ attention for the
majority of the lesson, had very strong on-topic discussions about self-respect, respecting others, and
respecting your school and community, and had cooperative participation in our playdough activity
and modeling kind language activity. If I was going to teach this lesson again, I would change how
much of our lesson was just discussion-based and I would add a written portion. I would add to the end
of our lesson that we would have students complete a notebook entry where they wrote down at least
one way they can respect themselves, one way they can respect others, and one way they can respect
their school. I would add in a written element to this lesson to incorporate reading and writing into the
lesson and add a better way for us to gauge if students seemed to understand our lesson or not.

2. Compare how students actually responded to the lesson verses the way you anticipated they
would respond. Explain how you scaffolded or extended students’ thinking.

For the most part, students responded to the lesson the way that I anticipated they would. The majority
of student responses about how they can respect themselves, others, and the school were responses that
I expected to hear like “be kind to our classmates”, “pick up our materials and clean up the classroom”,
and “eat healthy foods”. However, something that I did not anticipate was that while we were in the
middle of a discussion about respecting others, that students would be being disrespectful by talking
when one of their classmates were sharing, getting up and walking around, or not listening to
instructions fully. This led us to be able to extend students’ thinking by giving them examples of ways
that they were not showing respect in the moment that we were discussing respecting others, which
was actually very beneficial to making our discussion meaningful.

3. Describe how you assessed whether your students achieved the objective of the lesson. Was
this effective? If not, what would you change about your assessment?

We assessed whether our students achieved the objective of the lesson by having a review discussion at
the end of our lesson. I do not think this was the most effective strategy that we could have used
because it didn’t help us gauge how much each individual student learned. I think that we could change
the assessment to a notebook entry where they would write down the things that they learned from the
lesson.

4. How effectively did you motivate your students, set and enforce expectations, and handle
transitions? Would you change anything and if so, why?
 Elementary Education Program
Department of Teacher Education & Learning Sciences

I think we effectively motivated our students because they were all excited and enthusiastic to be
involved with our discussion. The students were also very excited to work with the playdough to shape
something that represents how they can respect themselves and happily shared what they made with
their classmates. I think we also did a good job setting and enforcing expectations because we
explained our expectations of our discussion: raise your hand and wait to be called on to share your
thoughts, and our expectations of working with playdough: do not mix colors or trade with other
students. I think we could have done a better job enforcing proper vocabulary and language during our
discussion. We could have stressed that we wanted them to use sentence starters when sharing to work
on forming full sentences, like “I respect myself by ___” instead of just saying “I do ___”.

5. Did you make modifications to your lesson plan during the lesson? If so, what were they and
what motivated these changes?

The only thing that we modified during our lesson plan was the questions that we had the students
share responses to with their partners during the modeling kind language activity. The only reason we
made these changes was because we had more time to discuss than we planned and wanted students to
get more practice modeling kind language.

6. How did you meet your Teaching Behavior Focus? If you did not meet it, what would help
you to meet it next time?

We met our Teaching Behavior Focus by trying really hard to focus on highlighting the things that our
students were doing well during our discussions and activities instead of focusing on the things that
students were doing incorrectly during our discussions and activities. We made sure to point out people
who were being respectful when others were talking and said things like “thank you to my friends who
are sitting quietly and actively listening to the person who is sharing” and “thank you to my friends
who are modeling kind language and staying on-topic”.