Co-teaching With Three

Richard's co-teaching session was a bit different than his team member's.  The reason for that was that Richard has a student teacher with him, Cindy, and we pulled her into our lesson as well.  She took a real risk as she was not able to plan the lesson with us, but jumped right in and co-taught with Richard and myself.

The strand that Richard's Grade 2's are working on right now is measurement.  Richard and Cindy wanted to see what the students knew about time, and if there were any gaps that they needed to fill in prior to teaching the expectation for the grade.  The lesson was in the three - part lesson format:  Minds on:  Compare the times on a digital and analogue clock; Action: answer a problem based on one of the students in his class:  M started watching a TV show at 5:30pm (time shown in an analogue clock) when the show was over he looked at the time on the VCR and it said 6:00.  M said the show was a half an hour long.  Is he correct?  Explain your answer.  Then to Consolidate, we brought up two students who used two different strategies to share their work.

When the lesson was over Richard, Cindy and myself had the rest of the morning to moderate mark, give each student descriptive feedback on their work, and then do some planning for the remainder of the unit.

What was great about this debrief was not only did Cindy get to see all that is involved in planning and marking, but her and Richard got to have a really focused and professional discussion on strengths and needs of the students in the class.  This is especially important because it allows Cindy the chance to make real-time decisions about the students she is teaching, and plan for the remainder of the unit that she is teaching for her teaching block. 

After all of the descriptive feedback was done, and the feedback given to the marker students recorded on the template, they then sorted the next steps into areas of need.

These areas were:
a) use information from the question to help them;
b) make sure that all parts of the question are answered; and
c) add more specific details into the answer.

As Cindy plans the remainder of the unit, she's got some things to think about and make sure that she is incorporating into the unit.