Best Laid Plans | Week 7 Reflection

There was one particular situation in class this week that stuck out to me. In the GT Biology class, my mentor teacher and I have been working with the students on macromolecules. They have been introduced to the four different types of macromolecules through notes, videos, craft projects, and readings. My mentor teacher has planned many different methods for helping the students to get familiar with the new concepts and to be able to distinguish between the different molecules. For many of the students, this is their first in-depth look at carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids. In this lesson, there is also a lot of new vocabulary. Something the students have been getting confused about is that there are often several terms that mean the same thing (subunit, building block, monomer). It has taken some time and many different activities for the students to get the hang of all of the new vocab, but we were finally confident that we could move on from the introduction of these molecules into their reactions.

On Thursday, we introduced an activity to them where they would be answering questions and then cutting out shapes and manipulating them to help them visualize dehydration reactions that combine monomers into a polymer. It was clear early on that several of the students were getting lost. My mentor teacher decided to stand at the front of the class and walk through the steps with the students to model the activity. Still, students were having trouble answering the questions for that activity while also trying to figure out what they were cutting and how to connect the shapes of paper to the concepts there were supposed to be learning. It took nearly half of the class period to get the majority of the class back on track. It was tough for the students and tough for us as teachers to figure out what was going wrong and how to fix it. We were having trouble figuring out where the disconnect was and the students were having trouble explaining what they weren't understanding.

In particular, there was one student who had all but given up on the activity out of the frustration. When I walked around to the table where she was sitting to ask how they were doing, she said to me, "I don't understand any of this." I spent the next several minutes talking through what we were doing to try to understand where the break down in her understanding occurred. At one point, when I realized that the problem might extend beyond this activity, I asked her if she could tell me what a macromolecule is and she could not. After not being able to answer the question, she expressed to me that she was having trouble keeping track of all of the vocabulary words. We talked a little bit about what would help her to keep track of the words. Unfortunately, the class was ending at this point so we weren't able to make any further progress.

After the class I talked to my mentor teacher about the interaction and we concluded that several students seemed to be having trouble remembering all of the new words. We made a plan to give students a set of flash cards for the new vocabulary so that they had one single thing to look at when they couldn't remember a definition, rather than having to search through all of their notes. I look forward to giving these to the students and seeing if that helps.

Ultimately, what this taught me (and what I continue to learn from being in the classroom) is that, as a teacher, you have to constantly be adjusting your instruction and staying aware of how students are doing with the material you are presenting to them. Teaching is a constant back and forth and the final instruction is often quite a bit different from the initial plan. It is clear that some of the most important skills for good teachers to develop are flexibility and the ability to adapt when needed. It's been endlessly helpful to watch and participate in the process through my mentor teacher's classroom.