Comprehensive Reflection

Assessing students’ prior knowledge may change throughout each lesson that is taught and mine did when I taught my lessons. Assessing students’ prior knowledge is important when teaching. This may take the form of asking students questions, having students tell you what they know about a certain concept, and even doing a KWHL chart. This affects my future teaching experiences because it is important to know what students prior knowledge concerning a concept that way you know what to teach them.

Planning and designing instruction is vital when teaching because teachers shouldn’t “just wing it”. They should know what they are going to teach and how they will teach the concept(s) to the students. Designing instruction can take various forms including, using technology and hands on materials/activities. This affects my future teaching experiences because it is important to know what you are going to teach to your students and different ways that you are going to get the concepts across to your students.

Planning assessment and the assessment of learning are the only ways to know whether or not your students have understood your teaching and what you are presenting to them. These two elements of teaching also lets you as the teacher know how effective you were in getting the information across to the students. This affects my future teaching experiences because it is a reminder that I need to always plan for assessment and actually implement an assessment.

Instructional decisions and teaching need to have a variety of formats. For example, teaching shouldn’t always be based on verbal/linguistic formats. Teaching needs to occur through bodily/kinesthetic, logical/mathematical, and etc. Instructional decisions shouldn’t be based entirely on the teacher’s decisions, yet students should also have a choice as to what occurs during the school day. This affects my future teaching experiences because it is a reminder to vary instructional decisions and teaching itself.

Kente Cloth Reflection Part 2

In order to teach my lesson about Kente Cloth, I had to explain to my peers about the Homowo Festival. When teaching this lesson to actual students, this would be day 2 of a lesson about the Homowo Festival and students would have already learned about the festival the day before; however, I would still review the festival with the students anyway. After reading a short synopsis of the Homowo Festival to my peers, I showed them a short powerpoint presentation that described Kente Cloth and gave real life examples of what it looks like. I then asked them to describe the patterns that are in the cloth. Students would need to know what a pattern is in order to be successful in my lesson. Because my peers already knew what a pattern was, I didn’t go into too much detail explaining the patterns in the examples of the Kente Cloth. I would change this in teaching this lesson to younger students. In a math lesson we would learn about patterns, but to reinforce it more we would talk about patterns in the Kente Cloth more than what I did here. After we looked at real examples, I showed them how to create patterns in Pixie and gave them the task of creating their own Kente Cloth in Pixie using the different meanings of the colors.

My teaching aligned to the objective because students learned about Kente Cloth and its purpose in the Homowo Festival. Students were even able to create their own Kente Cloth. As for modifications, a couple students finished early. When that occurred, I asked them to explain their Kente Cloth to me and show me the patterns they created. As well, I explained to my peers that they could use the meanings of the colors in their Kente Cloth for an added challenge.

For assessment, my peers were successful in accomplishing my objective for this lesson. They were able to create their own Kente Cloth with patterns in Pixie. After teaching using Pixie, I should have explained in more detail how to create a pattern in Pixie. My explanation was brief. One of my classmates commented on the fact that I should be little more familiar with Pixie than I was, but I totally agree with her. I was successful teaching; however, I could have explained a couple more things in more detail than I did, as already discussed. Overall, my classmates thought I taught the lesson well and they said that they wouldn’t do anything different than what I had done. They liked how I had real examples of Kente Cloth in my powerpoint presentation and how I had created a teacher example using Pixie.