Week+4

I found the lecture and workshop in Week 4 to be of great use and very interesting!. This weeks topic was based around Lesson planning and was a topic that I had been fairly anxious to cover. Pete took a great lecture and I felt between the lecture and the workshop all relevant areas of a lesson plan were covered. I found Pete's description of VELS and the structure of it to also be very useful (especially because many of our assessment tasks require us to use VELS!). Before this lecture I was having trouble understanding how the VELS levels related to the year levels in Primary school but I now understand that VELS level 1 relates to Preps, VELS level 2 is for years 1 and 2, VELS level 3 covers years 3 and 4 and VELS level 4 covers years 5 and 6 and I also have a greater understanding of the progression points in VELS.

Being introduced to the LaTrobe University Lesson planner was a huge relief for me. I had been growing quite stressed about how I was meant to complete assignments without fully understanding the structure of the lesson plan and I felt that this lecture should have perhaps taken place at an earlier week in the semester. But on the whole Pete's lecture was very informative for me and he included sufficient information on how to approach each section of the lesson plan. The follow up on this in the workshop was also of extreme value and having the opportunity to prepare a mock lesson plan based on leaping frogs as a class was a fantastic way of bringing all we had covered in the lecture together. Well done Pete!!

As part of my readings for this lecture I have explored various parts of the VELS website, mainly focusing on the lower VELS levels in both maths and literacy. I have found VELS to be a great guide in making it clear to me what students should know by a certain stage in their eduaction and therefore what to include in the planning of lessons.

I also visited the website included under this weeks workshop [] and read about questioning techniques. This site made a very good point when it said that questioning students enables teachers to check a students understanding. The site also has a short animation that explains questions in the classroom. It stated that questions are the most common interaction between teachers and students and one third of all teaching time is spent asking questions. It also discusses how questions are essential in learning and that questions in a classroom have the role of gaining the interest of the students, engaging them and challenge them. It also allows teachers to establish what students altready know and what they have learnt in a unit of work. I found the information on how to plan questions and what types of questions to ask the most informative and useful. The animation explains that although as teachers we cannot plan all the questions we will be asking we should have a good idea about many questions we will ask and we should make sure we do not ask our students too many closed questions or yes or no questions. Teachers should plan how much time they will give students to answer questions and what language will be used (ie: challenging language). The different types of questions were also analysed: empirical questions relate to facts, conceptual questions relates to definitions and reasoning, value questions cover beliefs and moral issues By far one of the most valuable of topics this talk provided was a checklist for asking questions. - What is the question trying to achieve? - What is the focus of the questions? - Does it help solve problems? - How will it make decisions and judgements based on the students learning?

This website would be great to further explore because it also has information on lesson planning, learning styles, identifying underachievers and thinking skills as well as many other great topics. I found this weeks lecture and workshop to be the most valuable so far in preparing me to become a teacher next year. It was informative and was presented in a easy to understand and friendly manner.

Emily Toomey March 26, 2009