Reflection on First Science Experience in Room 2

Bridges

Today I would like to reflect on my first science experience in Room 2 (year 3 and 4)

First, I did not manage to get the experience done in week 1 as I intended to. The practical (create) part took much longer than anticipated. Most students were really engaged in it, but there were 3 students that did not want to participate, despite my best efforts to get them involved. (That would be a separate reflection on behaviour).

Secondly, applying Talanoa was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I assumed the students would know what participation and speaking clearly would mean. When we unpacked it, I realised that they had no idea, so I spent some time trying to explain it, but it will need lots of practice and reminding.

Then, I focussed on the wrong aspect of Talanoa first. I chose to focus on questions, and although they understood what that meant, they really struggled to understand how to use the sentence starters, and they really struggle with listening to each other. There is a lot of talking over me as the teacher and their peers.

And lastly, I focussed more on the lesson progression than on the dialogue.

Next steps:
Choose a new focus - listening to each other. Think really carefully about what that looks like.
Create a norm for listening to each other. Display this where everybody can see it.
Work with my focus group first - rather than trying to work with the whole class.
Plan for a shorter lesson.
Look at Colleague's lesson plan examples to ensure I am planning correctly, then share with TLIF team and ask for feedback on my lesson.
Refer back to the textbook on examples of how to introduce the dialogue.

Photos
Just for interest - here are some photos of what the students created. We wrote in our books the criteria of the bridges which was: it had to be 30cm long, had to be strong and had to have one of the structured we learned about.
Then they drew a diagram in the books with labels. After we built the bridge, we took a photo and pasted it in our books to compare what we planned and what we actually did. And then they completed a little reflection sheet to determine if they kept to the criteria and what they would do differently next time.