Setting Objectives, Cues-Questions and Advance Organizers, Homework and Practice ... My Reflection

As I progress through another class, I am allowed to look at my instructional practices inside my classroom. This time my reflection gives you a look at a time when setting objectives and using Cues, Questions and Advanced Organizers and Homework and practice worked well in my class. In a previous blog post I discussed setting objectives and how allowing students to own their learning produces better results. In this post I will give you a window into a time when I was teaching my students to use Excel and what they did that surprised me.

I asked students to choose two cities and track the amount of precipitation for those cities over the course of three weeks. Additionally, they were also to compare the precipitation for the same two cities during the same month for the previous year. I was pleased with the results. This was a lesson I did when I taught computer technology class in the computer lab and used for students with students in grades 4 through 8.

The more advanced students in the 4Th and 5Th grades were able to create a table to compare the amounts of precipitation for their cities and actually chose to track information for more than two cities. They then became assistants in the class and helped the other students with creating their tables and explored features I hadn't taught them to use. The sixth through eighth graders did this with ease and went on to find other products they could create with the information they gathered about their cities while tracking the amounts of precipitation.

Why did it go well? I believe this went well because I set a very clear objectives from the beginning and the students understood them. They realized when they were meeting the objectives and were able to gage their own progress. Once they had met the outlined objectives they felt free to explore, learn on their own and share what they learned and taught themselves. I loved this... my students did too.