Information Processing TIPR

Current Teacher Behavior
1. My cooperating teacher works hard at trying to catch students' attention, often utilizing things that would effect sensory input (bolding things on the model texts he projects onto the board, fluctuating his voice, "this would be a good thing to know if you want to boost the grade on your paper"). New information is rehearsed with worksheets that focus on that day's skill so students can practice and incorporate it into their own writing. There isn't a ton of wait time, but there also aren't many questions asked that need it. The class is mainly lecture-based lately and doesn't call for many activities that would necessitate that students retrieve or reconstruct concepts from today's class or previous ones.
edTPA Prep
Also, answer these questions:
  1. Prior knowledge isn't activated all that much, except on extremely simple concepts that have been pounded into students' brains since elementary school (POV, for example). Even then, the teacher doesn't rely on students providing that info even though he's sure they know it. For example, I taught a lesson on POV and asked the students to provide definitions and examples of 1st and 3rd person POV. But when the teacher taught the same lesson he just covered it very quickly himself, even though he acknowledged that they've known it from first grade. All mentions of prior knowledge from the teacher don't ask students to demonstrate it, he merely states "you guys know this" and then reviews it.
  2. This comes into play when students practice the day's concepts on their own writing, which is often focused on their personal interests and cultural backgrounds. Class-wide instruction is largely uniform and doesn't account for individual assets. If there was more time to spend with students one-on-one in the second half of instruction where students are applying the day's concepts to their writing this wouldn't bother me as much. But there's only two of us and enough time to link about four students' unique experiences and cultural backgrounds to their writing in a given class period. This means 3/4 of the class don't get feedback on how the day's concept applies to their day-to-day life.
  3. The teacher does well at taking responses and questions during the modelling process, often calling for feedback and how it relates to the day's concept. For example, when teaching counterclaim he asked students to identify what the model text's author's claim was and what could be said to refute it. This elicited passionate and argumentative responses that the teacher was able to weave into his model writing that responded to the author's claim. The class got to write that rebuttal together, and it was the most communal moment I'd seen in the class all week. They were interested, impassioned, engaged, and they recalled the activity much better when we discussed it the next period looking for ideas for our own counterclaim writing.
Student Needs
2. Differentiating instruction would definitely help keep focus and encode concepts into long-term memory. The usual rhythm of model/lecture first and practice second is useful, but loses its impact because it's what we do literally every day. Using activities that engage visual and spacial learners would help sensory memory facilitate the encoding better. I also believe we're not asking student to reconstruct or retrieve previous information hardly at all. When working one-on-one with students I'll be asking them to provide their own definitions of concepts we cover (POV, voice, characterization, etc) to see how they understood it in previous lessons and assess if they know what they need to or if their understanding is stilted and needs correcting.
Plans for your Lesson
3. The above-mentioned differentiation to engage visual learners as well as engage sensory memory to help encode things to long-term memory. I did this by asking students to explicitly look for sensory descriptors of their characters to aid in characterization (what do they look like, sound like, smell like, etc). I offered students the chance to draw their character rather write their traits, which seven did. I noticed that four of those seven were the students who often aren't writing during this time, telling me they really needed the chance to use something other than writing to engage their learning and participation.

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