Live Lesson Reflection

There were two objectives of our live lesson. One objective was geared
towards more towards the vocabulary and language. The language objective was,
accurately summarize, in writing, how vegetation influences how water runof
afects an aquatic ecosystem using key vocabulary. The second objective was
related to the content of our lesson and ensuring that the actual concepts were
understood. The content object was, understand and describe how vegetation
influences water runof and the efects of water runof on a freshwater ecosystem. I
think we achieved these objectives and the student was able to both use the
vocabulary accurately and demonstrated understanding of how vegetation can
influence water runof. This can be seen in the answer Taralyn gave to the exit
ticket used at the end of the lesson. Taralyn was able to explain how vegetation
acts as a filter to remove substances from the water runof and that without
vegetation more pollutants would make it to the water and be detrimental to the
freshwater ecosystem.
The goal of challenging Taralyns vocabulary/language development was a
little harder for us. While we felt we were choosing words that would be above her
grade level, however we quickly learned that Taralyn had a basic understanding of
what these words were. By accessing her prior knowledge of each word, we were
able to gauge what her understanding of each word was prior to the lesson. In
general, she had a great foundation for what each word meant, which meant a
lesson dedicated to understanding the individual words would have only taken a few
minutes. We were able to still bring in the element of challenging her vocabulary
and language development by putting the vocabulary in a greater context. Because
of her basic understanding of the words, we were able to go further than simply

teaching her what the words mean. We decided to teach her how all the words
connect rather than simply what they mean.
I think the exit ticket we chose was a little too simple. While I feel it
adequately gauged and reflected the objectives, I feel like we could have ensured
understanding with a more difficult prompt. One reason I feel the exit ticket was
too simple was because we chose to include a summary of the lesson in one slide
just before providing her with the exit ticket. The summary was a way for us to
reinforce not only the vocabulary and how all the words related, but the content of
lesson in one quick summary. I think one thing that we could have changed is have
her answer the prompt for the exit ticket first rather than the summary. I think this
way we could have ensured that Taralyn understood the lesson in her own words,
rather than simply reiterating what we said in the summary. I also feel like we did
not introduce erosion in the best way. I think because Taralyn was not actually and
ELL student we got away with this. We kind of quickly through in the word erosion
into the lesson and then did not focus on it very much. If this lesson was given again
I think we would focus more on erosion and maybe even give her a real world
example of where erosion has been a real issue.
If the student for this lesson was a true ELL student with a basic
understanding of the English language, it would have needed to be stripped down a
little more. I would have altered the language objectives to focus more on having an
understanding of what the vocabulary words mean. It also might have been in the
best interest of the student to reduce the amount of vocabulary words they would
learn. Rather than focusing on ensuring the student understands how all the words
connect, we could have broken the lesson down to simply teaching the student
about ecosystems and understanding that an ecosystem has biotic and abiotic

factors. I also think if I was teaching this lesson to an ELL student, I would have used
more visual aids to emphasis the meaning of the words. One idea of a visual aid we
had for this lesson was to actually use cut outs of abiotic and biotic factors that the
student could manipulate. They could group the cut outs into abiotic and biotic
factors to better reinforce the idea. We also would have needed to simplify the exit
ticket. One thing we could have done is changed the prompt to a spoken rather
than written prompt. We could have asked the student to use vocabulary words
accurately in a sentence that they spoke to us.