Kevin Graham November 9, 2012 TIE 535 TPA Task 2: Instruction Commentary 1.

In the instruction seen in the clip(s), describe strategies you used to engage students in learning tasks to develop skills and strategies to comprehend or compose text. a. Cite examples of strategies aimed at engaging all your students and examples aimed at engaging specific individuals or subgroups. If you described any of these fully in the lesson plans or the planning commentary, just reference the relevant description. This section of my lesson came after a think-pair-share where students worked independently and then with a partner to fill in a graphic organizer. This section reflects the share part of the lesson. In this section of the lesson, I used a graphic organizer to help my students grasp the lesson objective of being able to compare information from multiple sources in order to develop an understanding of the concept of justice. This organizer was a Venn diagram that was used to compare the preamble of the Constitution to the epilogue of Hammurabis Code. I used this strategy so that students would be able to see the similarities and differences in a visual manner because many of the students are visual learners. This strategy was aimed at engaging all of my students in the lesson. I also used a document camera in order for the students to be able to see the Venn diagram being filled in according to the group discussion. I used a whole group discussion for this section of the lesson because the students in this class like the option of being able to share their answers with the rest of the group. As for the content, I decided to use the preamble to the US Constitution to compare with Hammurabis Code in order to make the lesson more relevant to the students lives. Cold call was also used in order to get students participating in the lesson who would normally not participate and would lose engagement. b. How did these strategies reflect students academic or language development, social/emotional development, or cultural and lived experiences? The graphic organizer reflected the students academic development by allowing the visual learners to see their ideas of how the two texts were similar and different. The document camera was also used to target the visual learners and help them follow along with the organizer as it was completed. The Venn diagram also allowed the students to put their ideas into writing, which aided in their language development. The group discussion for the share out reflected the social/emotional development of the students. This class is comprised of students who are generally very social and work well

together when sharing ideas. The whole class share out enabled students to be able to communicate their ideas to their peers which aided in their social development. The preamble to the Constitution was used to compare to Hammurabis Code in order to make the lesson more relevant to the students lives and experiences because it is something that directly affects them on a daily basis. 2. Cite examples of language supports seen in the clip(s) to help your students understand that content and/or participate in literacy discourse central to the lesson. a. How did these strategies reflect students varying language proficiencies and promote their language development? This lesson is part of a larger unit on justice in Hammurabis Code. In this lesson, the focus was on comparing two texts in order to get a better understanding of the topic, which was justice. The discussion focused around the idea of justice in the preamble compared to the epilogue of Hammurabis Code. Within this discussion, there was also reference to the vocabulary word of the day: righteousness. This vocabulary word was used in the discussion to boost students familiarity with the term justice. By comparing the two texts, the students were able to see that justice is found in many places and viewed in different ways. Throughout the lesson, I repeated student answers to the questions to make sure that all students in the room could hear what their peers said. After repeating the student responses, I also built upon and expanded them in order to go more in depth into the comparison between the two texts. 3. Describe strategies for eliciting student thinking and how your ongoing responses further their learning. Cite examples from the clip(s). Throughout the discussion, I elicited student thinking by asking questions that were directed at helping students compare the two texts, such as: Why was it written? What was the purpose? Who wrote it? How are they similar? How are they different?. The first questions asked were lower order questions that only required text evidence to answer. The questions that followed were then higher-order to encourage students to think deeper in order to compare and contrast the two texts. As students responded to the higher-order questions, I rephrased the questions in order to make them clearer to the rest of the students in the class. For example, when one of the students responded, they both have laws and rules you have to follow so Hammurabi and it are just. To this, I responded, they both introduce justice to protect people. By responding in this way, I took the students answer and reworded it to make it clearer to the rest of the students.

4. Reflection a. Reflect on students learning of concepts and academic language as featured in the video clip(s). Identify both successes and missed opportunities for monitoring all students learning and for building their own understanding of skills and strategies for comprehending and/or composing text. In this video, it is clear that there were parts that worked and parts that did not work. Student engagement during this learning section was the biggest problem. There were students who wanted to answer every question, but there were more students who were clearly struggling to pay attention. Another drawback of this lesson was the amount of talking that I did compared to the amount of talking by the students. A missed opportunity during this lesson was to have students expand upon each others answers instead of expanding upon them myself. One of the successes in this lesson was the use of the concepts of righteousness and justice throughout the discussion. The whole discussion focused around these key concepts, which in turn strengthened the students understanding of these concepts. Another success of this lesson was the comparing two texts to get a better understanding of the topic of justice. I believe that the two texts worked well together to promote student learning of justice. b. If you could do it over, what might you have done to take advantage of missed opportunities or to improve the learning of students with diverse learning needs and characteristics? If I could teach this lesson again, I would use think-pair-share and write-pair-share activities to encourage more student participation in the discussion. I believe that this would allow for better discussions between the students and would allow the students to take ownership of the discussions. These activities would help students become self-directed learners and use more inquiry before sharing out with the rest of the class. I would also change the way I responded to student responses. Instead of rephrasing and expanding upon student answers, I would have the students respond to each others answers and ideas. This would encourage deeper thinking by the students and would put the learning back on them. I would also respond to some student answers with questions in order to scaffold students to higher level thinking that is desired.