Now on the fourth iteration of my plan for this Friday's observation, I keep coming back to what I'm going to present and what the students are going to do, how they are going to learn, what do I scaffold and what do I leave for them to struggle with. At first, I had the straightforward, direct-instruction lesson with times for students to work out the problem and I would randomly choose students to answer. Then I added an entire scaffold on the relationship of a container's volume to height, including borrowing a graduated cylinder from science and comparing data points from the cylinder with a two-cup measure. There's a problem in the book that asks students to match a container shape with a graph, and I saw this as a great mini-lesson in spatial reasoning, which I know from the research may come more easily to boys than girls. Then I added think-pair-share to the questions, which would give the students an opportunity to interact and get some informal feedback from each other. And I copied some worksheets which students could do in class and then hand in, allowing me to provide (non-graded) feedback to them for the following Tuesday.
Then I talked it over with my CT and realized that our main focus on Friday is to review for Monday's test, and I need to cut back my plan to keep the new material to 20 minutes or less. Back to the drawing board! The worksheet will be used for after the test on Monday, I'll pull some relevant questions from the book for Friday, I'll rewrite the plan and run it past my CT again tomorrow.... Where's another hour of sleep for tonight?
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