Reflection


 * A.** Using feedback from Professor Elliott, the lesson exit tickets and information gathered in class submitted advantages/disadvantage charts, we feel that many of the major points we wanted to convey were understood by the class. Evidence we used for this were comments such as "Your lesson deepened my understanding of flexible grouping." and "I learned that flexible grouping is based on individual needs." While this was encouraging feedback, we also know that there are plenty of areas for growth. One comment we found particularly helpful was from Professor Elliott, stating that we moved too quickly through the discussion portion of the lesson and possibly missed some opportunities for learning. We also felt this during and after the lesson, but in order to get through the entire lesson in the time frame we had to press on. I think this is an important lesson for us to continue to be conscience of how much/little time should be dedicated to certain activities. One guiding question we can think to use for the future in this aspect would be:


 * How can instructional discussion lead to extended learning opportunities?**

Logistically, the feedback showed that the class really enjoyed the use of the notecards in assessing prior knowledge and engaging them in our scenario activity. This leads us to continue to think about ways that both assess student knowledge and create learning opportunities. We can consolidate these thoughts into a second question:


 * In what ways can we assess students formatively and engage students in learning activities?**

Since this strategy seems to have been effective, we will probably look for ways in which to employ similar strategies in our teaching in the future.

Using TLIC feedback from the class, we have evidence that the class thought we did a strong job of anticipating the next steps of the lesson. This was good to hear, but I think we can couple that with feedback from Professor Elliott in also remembering that anticipation includes giving enough time for discussion and thinking about transition time for different age levels of students.

**B.** We learned that it takes a lot of time to plan a lesson that is intended for co-teaching. Our lesson took a lot of clarifying for ourselves, and we think that gave us greater insight on how to explain the topic of flexible grouping to our “students”. We kind of just planned to switch off talking through the different points, so we were really pleased that Lori said that we seemed like we’d been co-teaching for years! It really makes a bold statement about how much planning is necessary to implement even a short lesson to a group of students with a large prior knowledge base.


 * C. **For feedback, see Classroom Follow-up


 * Student Comprehensions: **

TJ understood that ability/aptitude grouping was the first scenario because it was based solely on standardized test scores. Rebecca understood that Scenario Two was Cooperative Grouping because the students had to have some similar interest based knowledge on the topic in order to be in one of these groupings. Cristen thought that flexible grouping was Scenario Three because it was based on the students’ present needs, the difference between that and the other two scenarios was that they’re only in this group for a particular lesson.


 * Student questions from class: **

Q: TJ - Is the book saying that flexible grouping is better than the others? A: Not at all! It's just showing you different options for grouping students at different points in the lesson. Q: Blue Group - Even though it's flexible grouping, won't the students eventually figure out that they're in the group that constantly needs more focused instruction? A: Possibly, but the key to flexible grouping is to use it sparingly - only when needed, not every day. Q: Can you pull the students that need more instruction and then just let the other students choose their centers? The idea for flexible grouping is that each student is learning at his own level. Instead of just letting them chose which center they'd like to complete, the intention is to give them material that will challenge their own personal learning.

**D.** If we were teaching this course again, we would plan more extensively for questions both that we had and that the class had. We planned to facilitate discussions by using “how” and “why” questions, but maybe if we could do it again we would expand these into full questions that focus the discussion a little more on exactly where we’re trying to go. Professor Elliott commented that we might not have given students enough time to expand on their questions and offer further clarification, so we’d want to improve on that. We’d also make sure to clarify our objectives at the beginning of the class; I think some students thought our lesson was about different types of grouping so we might try to clarify that we were focusing in on flexible grouping and explain that we’re comparing and contrasting flexible grouping with various different types of grouping.