Teaching our First Lesson

     At the beginning of the week, my co-teaching partner and I were asked to teach our first lesson.  It was a reading lesson.  We read the story, Zathura: A Space Adventure by Chris Van Allsburg with the fifth grade students in our four/five combo class.  Prior to reading the story, we reviewed several vocabulary words that the students had previous exposure to and that would be found again in the story we were reading.  After reviewing the vocabulary and going over some reading strategies, we pulled popscicle sticks with the students’ names written on them from a basket to determine the order that the students would read aloud.  After each student had the opportunity to read atleast half a page of text in the story, my co-teaching partner and I read the rest of the story aloud to the students.  We used different voices for different characters, such as a robot. We also used intonation in our voices and gestures and sounds that helped the story come alive a bit more for the students.    

     Throughout the reading we stopped to ask the students comprehension questions about the story as well as fill out a workbook page about using evidence from the story to form conclusions.  We had a handful of the same students raising their hands to answer the questions and mostly called on them.  Our mentor teacher suggested that we also call on students that were not raising their hands in order to gauge their understanding and get them involved in the lesson.  This was difficult to achieve at times.  When I called on students to see if they had anything to add to the discussion, they oftentimes did not have anything to say and I did not know how to get them to answer.  I was worried about putting them on the spot or making them uncomfortable.  I did not want to make them hate reading because I called them out in front of their peers.  This made me think of Passion One from our reading in The Reflective Educator’s Guide to Classroom Research by Dana and Yendol-Hoppey.  How do you help an individual child participate in a lesson? The students lack of interaction also made me wonder why they were not participating.  Did they not understand the questions? Did they depend on or assume one of the students that frequently raised their hand would answer again? Did they not like the story? How could we get them to participate?
     My co-teacher and I asked several questions throughout the story.  Maybe too many.  They were all great questions in my opinion, but it made us go over our allotted time.  We were not able to start the last workbook page with the students that we were supposed to do with them during the reading block.  This made me think of Passion Four from the reading: Improve or Experiment with Teaching Strategies or Techniques.  Moreover, it made me wonder which questions would be most important to ask the students?    
     Overall, our first lesson went well. I hope to more effectively utilize questions as well as find ways to engage all students in future lessons.