Valerie Sosnowski Teaching Reflection I taught my lesson yesterday, and I taught it to two different classes.

I personally think it went well. I learned a lot, but the question is not whether I learned a lot; its whether the students learned a lot. I am attempting to answer the question, Was the lesson effective? The difficulty with this question is that I dont have data to support my conclusion. I am making inferences about what the students learned and whether or not the objectives were met based on the students responses to the lesson. The only data I have was a formative assessment we did throughout the lesson where students were asked to answer questions. Then, at random I would call on a student and ask him/her what he/she thought and why. For most of these questions, the students got the right answer and explained their reasoning. The difficulty with that is that sometimes I know what they mean, even though they arent saying (or even thinking) what I think theyre saying. A couple of the students responses, however, were completely wrong and off the wall and surprised me. I didnt expect them to know the answers to the questions before we began, but I didnt expect them to know the wrong answer. There were a handful of times where students would answer a question with 100% certainty and be 100% wrong. One student stated that only men pass mutations on to their offspring. Another stated that if both parents have two recessive alleles, a child can get a dominant allele from a grandparent. And a couple of students said they got their answer because 2^5=64 (2^6=64 and 2^5=32). Other times I would ask a student why he/ she got his/her answer and he/she would admit that he/she guessed. This is frustrating, but it points to a major problem with our education system: students are used to being told the answer then regurgitating those answers on tests. It is also frustrating because students resist thinking for themselves in lieu of being told what to think. This is a scary thought: that we have taught students not to think for themselves, but just to do what theyre told. Getting back to my original question: Was the lesson effective? This is also difficult because we didnt finish the lesson in any of the classes. So I got to teach and see the inquiring part of the lesson, but I missed (or will miss) most of the analysis and drawing conclusions. This is where most of the learning is displayed, and in my opinion, where most of the learning takes place. What we did so far was present the question to the students and start making conjectures and testing our hypothesis. We also started examining and collecting data, so hopefully the students are thinking, Whats going on?, How could this have happened?, What is the data telling me/suggesting? Students suggested a couple hypotheses so far, but some were more valid than others. In the next lesson, my cooperating teacher will continue the data collection and analysis of the data. If the lesson isnt completed in the class period, I may get to observe their data analysis and conclusion in the following class period. Then I could better answer the question: Was the lesson effective? Based on my available data, I would say that students were engaged. Students were actively attempting to answer the question and come up with valid hypothesis. Students were suggesting ways to test our hypothesis and ways to rule out other hypotheses. Students were also starting to think outside of the box and give answers that, while feasible, are probably novel to them at this point in their biology education. They suggested some hypotheses that were extremely farfetched, and others that

were next to impossible to prove or discredit. While this makes it difficult to explore these different avenues, it also exposes them to the nature of science: we cant really know anything for sure. There always exists a remote possibility that something bizarre or something that weve never seen before is actually the culprit. Science is explaining what we observe in nature. Therefore, I didnt discredit any of their hypotheses. I acknowledged that they were all possible, we discussed the likelihood and probability of each, and we talked about how you might go about proving or disproving those hypotheses. In conclusion, the lesson that I taught will take at least two class periods. I taught the first one, which was the inquiring part of the inquiry lesson. The students actively engaged in the discussion and asked questions to get the background information. They also presented some hypothesis that we could test and others that we could not test. They proposed tests that we could do in class, and others that were not feasible in our class. This part of the lesson was successful. The students learned how to start with a question, do some background investigations, and propose a hypothesis. Then they presented their hypotheses and how they intend to test those hypotheses. Therefore, I would say that the lesson was effective. There was no structured assessment (for this lesson). The formative assessment implied the lesson was effective. I tried my best to call on a different student every time and randomly select each so as to take an accurate sample size of the class. If the students I called on were indicative of the rest of the class, then the fourth hour class understood a lot better than the third hour class. Both classes made good discussions and arguments for their opinions, but the fourth hour class was almost always correct. The third hour class was generally 80% correct, meaning they would have most of the reasoning correct, but one key element might be wrong. Sometimes the answer would be right, but the explanation would be lacking. Generally it was a misconception or a hole in their prior knowledge. When I would go over correct answers, I would get a couple of good question. Then the students would get subsequent questions correct, so I inferred that they learned from their original mistake. All in all, I think they got the inquiring part of the lesson down. I hope I get to see the drawing conclusions part next time I go in.