TEACHER CANDIDATE: Maddi Kirby

COOPERATING TEACHER: Diane Riegel

SCHOOL: Lamar West
GRADE: 5th
DATE: 3/30/2017
GOAL: The candidate understands and knows how to use a variety of self-assessment and
problem-solving strategies to analyze and reflect on his/her practice and to plan for
adaptations/adjustments.

Over the course of this past month, I have been working towards being able to self-assess

and problem-solve while I was teaching to adjust my lesson to meet the needs of my students

better. One example of a time this occurred was while I was doing the introduction section of a

math lesson. After the first class was over, before the second class began, my teacher and I had a

little pow wow. She helped me think aloud a self-reflection on how the introduction went and

what I could do to make the second introduction go even better so that the students could get the

most possible out of that time. We continued this pattern after each class that day so that she

could help me learn how to self-assess and then make the proper adjustments so that I could

maximize my students' learning time.

A second example of a time this occurred was while I was teaching a math lesson over

creating and using equivalent problems to solve a division problem containing decimals. The

first time I taught the lesson I followed the plan for teaching this concept word for word. After

the lesson was over, I was reflecting on how it went and did not feel that it was as successful as it

should have been. I started thinking of ways that I could adjust the presentation of the

information so that it would make more sense to the second group of students. For the second

group, I reworded the way the information was said and gave a different example for how to

think about equivalent problems. The second group seemed to grasp the information much better

as did the other two groups that were taught that day. Even though the information would have
been taught well enough to all of the students using the original method, by self-reflecting and

then adjusting the instruction I was able to teach the rest of the students in a more effective way.