I was asked to do a lesson plan on cloud formation for Mr. W 8th period Meteorology students.

The demographic of this class is lower level students who have chosen this subject as an elective. The majority of the students have grades in the C- or D range, two students have a C, and one student has a B-. For the most part these students enjoy the topic of Meteorology, but struggle with the concepts. I was asked to introduce the topic of clouds. I was told that this lesson would be following a Fog lesson. In researching the lesson I came across a wonderful activity that took the abstract concept of condensation and cloud formation and made it a bit more visual for the students. The activity is called Cloud in a Bottle. This activity allows students to manipulate a 2 little bottle to show that temperature, pressure, humidity, and condensation nuclei were responsible for it. I believe a strength of this activity was the hands on approach it took, along with the visuals and ability for the students to manipulate it to see clearly that when adding pressure to the bottle the cloud disappeared and by letting go of the bottle (low pressure) the cloud formed. I further incorporated a concept that the students had struggled with into this activity, which is the use of a control. I believe that incorporating a control in this simple lab would help clarify it and show them that it helps eliminate alternate explanations of experimental results, especially experimental errors and experimenter bias. Another strength that my lesson had was the graphic organizer of the data I had created in order to help the students see clearly the relationship of the high and low pressure in the experiment. One of my main concerns was an ESL learner in the class. He has a difficult time with English and I have observed him being left out of discussions, not being able to follow instruction, and scoring poorly on his assignments. All of which, I believe, is due to his difficultly understanding the English language. I believe this lesson was highly engaging for the students in the class, especially the kinesthetically inclined ones that I have noticed that do not do well with some of the lecture based lessons I have observed. During the lesson I did feel that I was losing the attention of the students and had to raise my voice at times. I believe that for the most part I did well with the lesson, but believe that instead of raising my voice, in the future I will try simply being silent and waiting for the students to collect themselves. I have been assure by my cooperating teacher that this tactic has validity and is one he often resorts to. There are several areas that I look to improve in. The first and foremost one is assessing student understanding throughout the lesson. My questions for the most part were meant by silence, with only one or two students doing the majority of the discussion. I believe this happens to a lot of teachers and the best way to contend with this would be to directly call on students to answer questions as an invitation into the discussion. The objectives and CT Science Standards need to be listed on my student hand out. Although this is not a requirement for New Britain High School, it is a good practice to get into. It was explained to me that at a glance you can show any visiting observer or student what they should be getting out of the lesson. This not only helps the student, but you the teacher as well. It makes sure that you are focused on your goal and can quickly check to see if objectives of the lesson have been accomplished.

The other area where I believe improvement is necessary is that of anticipating common misperceptions. Improvement in this area most likely will need to be done with the planning stage and also by calling directly on students to answer questions to make sure that they are grasping the concepts I am introducing. I feel this will be an area that I will become naturally proficient in as I gain experience teaching, but in the beginning I will need to remain vigil of this weakness and be careful not to overlook it in my lesson plans. I would also look to improve the lab, due to the fact that temperatures role in clouds formation wasnt clearly identified in the lab. I believe by adding a strip thermometer hanging on a string from the top of the bottle would help students see the correlation more clearly. I might also think about taking out the use of a control, as my cooperating teacher had suggested. In my future classroom I hope to address the use of controls with more inquiry based labs that the students create. The students in this activity were definitely engaged and participating in it. The lowest grade seemed to be an 18 out 25 and I noticed this student did not complete question one which was designed to help address the confusion that these students were having using a control group. I was pleased to see the students answers on the third page of the handout. I noticed the difference in the students writing and their grammar and punctuation errors. The higher scoring students definitely answered the questions more elaborately. I question if this is because of a lack of understanding or a lack of motivation. This observation has lead me to believe that adding fill in the blanks, multiple choice, and true and false questions can help add a more complete picture to a teachers assessment of content knowledge.