The students loved the science lesson.

They rarely get to be so actively engaged in their

own learning and running experiments by themselves. They were really interested and stayed on
task, students are completely engaged and talking about what they see happening as the water is
poured (Penn Mentor Notes). The students were split into four groups of five or six students
per group, yet they all worked well together and discussed the two main ideas, erosion and
runoff, that was the goal of the experiment. I felt that this grouping of students was strong, Ms.
Harris and I have discussed who and where students should be sitting in the classroom and why.
Therefore, many of the different aspects for grouping have been assessed, a cooperative
learning group is an arrangement in which a group of students, usually of mixed ability, gender,
and ethnicity, work toward the common goal of promoting each others and the groups success
(Koch, 1996, 266). There were several other aspects of my lesson that I thought were incredibly
successful. A couple of my teacher moves, I felt contributed to some of the success of the lesson,
such as prompting students to see if they could use the words we had learned in our discussion. I
also made sure to set expectations and rules that were clear and consistent (Penn Mentor
Notes). Nick Gurol and I made sure to give students encouraging remarks and feedback, lots of
positive recognition (Penn Mentor Notes). These moves contributed to the goals of the lesson
being reached and I felt also lead students toward their own new investigations (Koch, 1996,
261). For the third science lesson, I have ever taught I thought it overall went pretty well.
Throughout the lesson, Nick and I made some changes according to what we were
noticing with the students. The first was that we did not just write down the erosion and runoff
definitions on the board, we instead discussed with students and created it together. This felt
more genuine then writing down what the textbook definition was. We also changed our
approach to student directions. Instead of giving all the students a worksheet that had their
directions on it, we went over directions step-by-step, which required us to bring the students
attention back to us before they returned to their experiment on a couple of occasions. We tried
to have groups doing different activities in the next lesson, while returning to this style of
directions and it failed. It was appropriate for this lesson though because all of the groups were
following the same directions, but I felt it took away from some of the learning opportunities for
students.
Although, there were a lot of small successes, there was plenty that could have been
improved on. For one, I should have let the students be the sense makers in defining the terms
about runoff and erosion. We did define the words together, but the students were truly just
guessing, students have many thoughts about the definitions of the words (Penn Mentor
Notes). The level of engagement from the students encouraged me but it would have been better
to see if students would discuss the terms in their own words through their observations. I could
have allowed the students to be the sense makers, instead of teaching the material. I thought
NancyLees advice of observing the classroom and interjecting the terms into student
conversations when they have discovered what the term means but are lacking the actual term of
erosion or runoff. Another way that I could have allowed students to be doing more of the
cognitive load is in the set up and the cleaning up of supplies. I was nervous of spills and how
dirty the lesson could get so I was careful to manage a lot of the messy aspects of the experiment.
However, if I were a student I would want the freedom to do some of it myself. I think that after
modeling one or two integral components to the experiment, I can allow the students to follow
the directions and discover on their own. The process of sense-making will take that next step
towards not only understanding the key scientific terms, but what aspects of the modeling
experiment are crucial to why it works.

Additionally, I failed to adjust my graphic organizer for all students in the class. It
required only writing and too much of it in that. I could have easily added a drawing component,
which would have allowed more of my class to successful portray their observations. In my
future graphic organizer, I changed the way that the students are recording their observations,
creating that space for drawing and not forcing sentence writing. I know when I am making
observations, that I am rarely writing full sentences, so I should not expect students to do more
than I would. A future step could be to write up a lap report where students would be required to
use their observations from their graphic organizer to produce complete sentences in paragraph
form. In lesson four of the Land and Water unit, the next lesson, I allowed students to draw what
they were observing and it was much more successful.
Most of the students used their own knowledge and background to describe what they
were seeing in the experiment. They used food analogies to observe how the land mass and
water looked. One student wrote that the water in the catch bucket, seemed to be the same color
as a salad dressing (Student A Graphic Organizer), while another student thought it looked more
like tomato soup with pieces of dirt in it (Student B Graphic Organizer). This was informative
and allowed students to get their ideas across, but none of the students wrote about our key terms
on their graphic organizer. This was not because they did not understand the term or how to
apply it, as they successfully integrated it into conversation, but instead was due to the fact that
the graphic organizer did not allow them to. The future graphic organizer for the lesson asks
students to draw what they are seeing, and one of my directions near the end of the lesson will be
to label where they see runoff and erosion in their sketches.
During the lesson, students were supposed to get up and walk around the room observing
each others Land and Water models. However, we ran out of time as the lesson had already
taken over an hour, so half of the graphic organizer was not even reached. As I reflected, and
NancyLee suggested, the students did not have too much to gain from viewing three models that
in theory should be very similar to their own. For future teaching, I would have the students
view only one other group and then they could really compare and contrast two models. The
future graphic organizer shows this, as students would be required to view one other groups
model, and mark down their observations while drawing what they observe as well.
In conclusion, the lesson was engaging and fun for the students but the ultimate goal of
learning about erosion and runoff could have been more successful. A few tweaks surrounding
situations where the students can become the sense-makers, instead of the teacher would help
this lesson dramatically. Students need to be put in a position where they can experience success
but they also have to be carrying the cognitive load more than the original lesson plan prescribes.
My question of how can I make students feel more confident in their ability to explain their
answers? would be more greatly addressed if students were allowed to draw what they observed
as well as write about it. I think it would have been interesting if we had more time, for one
student at each table to be given the role of facilitator, and each group could have had a short
discussion about the wrap-up discussion questions before returning to a whole class
conversation.
Works Cited
Koch, Janice. (1996). Science stories: Teachers and children as science learners. Houghton
Mifflin Company: Boston, MA. (pp. 254-274).