Supervisor Observation #3

Susan Tellefsen

This lesson that was recorded and reflected upon was for my 4 th grade students.
The lesson objective that we were working to master was understanding and
interpreting remainders in a variety of ways.
The beginning of the lesson was when I introduced to the idea of using a big tray of
Rice Krispies as a way of dividing and working with remainders. The students were
very excited and engaged at this point. At the beginning of the lesson, the video
shows that when I began to pull the background knowledge from my students about
dividing, what remainders were and what composite vs. prime numbers were, I had
over half of my 18 students raising their hand to take part in our whole group
discussion.
About 4.5 minutes into the video is when I prompted the discussion about
composite numbers and was trying to lead the students into deciding how many
pieces we should initially cut the Rice Krispy into in order to be able to share with
everyone. Prior to the lesson, the classroom teacher and I discussed how to best
approach this part with doing a table and showing the multiples of numbers that
would help to decide how many rows and columns needed to be made. Looking
back, I wish I would have taken note of the discussion or had a sticky with me
because when I got to this part, I had lost the idea of how I was going to accomplish
this. I think if I would have practiced this myself prior to the lesson, then I would
have been a bit more prepared.
26 minutes into the lesson I had students working on an independent problem to
show their understanding. One particular student that I observed could not think
through the division process of 5 divided by 6, she continued to tell me that it went
in 1 time. I ended up getting out some pens to demonstrate to her what the
problem was asking and after her being able to see that she only had 5 and could
not make a group of 6, she understood a bit better.
Lessons do not always go as we plan them and we need to be ready to do whatever
is best for the students learning, so if that means yielding the lesson in a different
direction or stopping where we are at in order to reach mastery, then thats what I
need to do. For this lesson I did not plan to split the class based on the need for reteaching the concept; however, that is what of the class was in need of. This was
observed as students were working on their independent division problem. So at
about 31 minutes into the lesson, we asked that students self-assess themselves
and if they felt they needed additional practice then they go to the back of the room
while the other students move on with interpreting remainders in other ways.
Some things that I would take away from this lesson are that students are very
engaged when they are working with something of interest to them, I must be
prepared to change what I have planned in order to provide an optimal learning
experience for my learners, it is beneficial to run through the lesson before hand or
to have notes of what you want to cover so that you dont overlook anything, and
by providing a variety of questioning techniques I am allowing for more diverse
participation in class discussions.