Evaluation for 6^th Grade Lesson

  I watched this lesson video with Angela and we also had a discussion of it together and evaluated it by giving it points in 12 aspects.

  The objective of this lesson is making connections from text in order to make inferences, and we could see the teacher in video did very well on teaching students how to do that and think deeper in 1 hour and 20 minutes.

  At the beginning of the class, the teacher told students to do some regular pre-reading for 5 minutes focusing on the little story about La and blue creature at school gate. And then the teacher asked students some questions that what they would do if they were La in that situation. After a brief communication, the class begin, that is, students need to do some inference from this story.

  So you can see, the teacher had drawn students’ attraction and induced their curiosity successfully. And what’s more, this story elicited a variety of students’ thinking because each student may be missed by their parents someday if something happened to their parents suddenly so that they have to wait for parents at the school gate in night alone. Although the teacher didn’t arrange many different activities to help students think except group work and just used white board for teaching, I have to give her 5 points on activities and materials because she performed perfectly. But Angela thinks that the teacher should use multimedia for teaching and arrange some interesting role-play games for students to help them understand the story and think deeply because these students are in 6 grade, multimedia and games can hold their attraction consistently, so she gives the teacher 3 points.

  For grouping students, Angela gives her 1 point and I give her 3 points. Angela said that the teacher just divided students into different groups without gender and capability consideration so that some students may feel not so good when they are in group working. Well, I agree with her in this point but I guess the teacher is so similar with these students so she doesn’t need to do that in limited teaching time. And I think students are all clear about what they need do after the teacher’s explanation so they are accountable for their group work. Anyway, she did not so bad so I give her 3 points here.

  In order to help students to make connections from the text so that they can make inference easily, the teacher divided the main objective into three sub-objectives, that is, the text evidence, questions students asked to themselves and connection finding and inference making. And she took almost 20 minutes to demonstrate it to students by implementing different strategies and ask one or two students to talk about their finding so that they can make sense about it and make connections and inference themselves.

  In the process of group working, the teacher always walked around the group table and sat down with students to ask some questions about the discussing process and provided some necessary guidance for students who did not so good in finding connections and encourage them to go ahead to explode the answer. As we could see, students all sent positive feedback to teacher and did excellent in answering questions.

  So we all think she could get 5 points in standards and objectives, presenting instructional content, lesson structure and pacing, questioning, academic feedback, teacher content knowledge and teacher knowledge of students.

  But the pity is that the teacher did not so good in problem solving and thinking. We didn’t get clear about students’ finished work and students didn’t speak out their deeper thinking about the La’s story with blue creature in terms of their own experience. So we give her 3 points here.

  Of course, she is a strong and powerful teacher who has done a perfect job on teaching making connections and inference for students. I got a lot from her teaching.