Jessica Stadler

Professor Reilly

Mini Lesson Reflection

6 September 2022

As a teacher, my biggest challenge while planning the lesson was ensuring that the class

would understand the lesson. It took a lot of creativity to plan a lesson that appealed to the entire

class. It was very good practice because as a teacher, I will have to plan my lessons around the

needs of all my students. Although it was challenging to plan, it got me more comfortable with

being able to adjust and be creative when planning lessons.

As a teacher, when teaching the lesson to the class, I found it challenging to assess the

students during and after the lesson. As a teacher, it is important to assess the students to ensure

they are comprehending and understanding the content. However, being unable to speak made it

difficult to see how the students were reacting to the content.

In order to overcome these challenges, we had to come up with new strategies to assess

the students and convey the information to the class. We did this by incorporating the “I do, we

do, you do” strategy. By doing this, we were able to give an example and show the students then

assess them to make sure they understood it. Also, we used a lot of visuals to explain the content

to the class.

This activity simulated instructing ELL students because it made us be creative and teach

the content in multiple different ways. ELL students may not be able to understand everything
we say, so the use of a lot of visuals can be used in the classroom, which is what we tried to do in

the lesson. Teaching ELL students involves using different methods and ways of teaching to

reach all students. Therefore, this lesson helped us understand how to give information to

students with all different needs and learning styles. In our lesson, we used language through the

use of pictures and actions.

As a student, I relied mostly on demonstrations, examples and visuals. For example, one

of the groups completed the activity first, then instructed us to do so. That definitely helped me

understand the content and what the teachers were trying to teach. Additionally, visuals on the

board helped a lot with understanding the material.

This activity helped us relate to a student’s experience who may be an ELL student. In a

classroom, an ELL student may understand some things the teacher says but probably not all of

it. We felt similar during this activity because at times we did not understand what the teachers

were saying and had to use our surroundings such as the pictures and visuals to figure it out.

Overall, the purpose of this activity was to get used to using creativity and multiple

teaching methods to give information to a class. On the other hand, from a student perspective,

this activity allowed us to be put in the shoes of an ELL students to allow us to understand how

they may learn in our own classroom.