Finishing Fieldwork Once Again

Yet again we have reached the end of a fieldwork cycle. This is always a bittersweet moment to reach. Our class of fifth graders was very intelligent and engaging to work with. I will miss them now that we are done, but I am proud of what we accomplished. Overall, I think my group's direct instruction was our best lesson. Our inquiry had a few "hick-ups" that could be improved with a little more practice and planning, especially when it comes to knowing where the students are going to move to their next station. Our cooperative learning lesson was a great experience as well. This was the first time I had taught a cooperative lesson. In class today we talked about what makes a cooperative lesson more than just group work. Group work is something that everyone has experienced in school at one point or another in their school career. Most people hear group project and they freat because people don't pull thier own weight and someone ends up doing it all. In a cooporative lesson, there is group processing. Group processing helps prevent the one person doing all of the work senario. Each person has a role that they are expected to fulfil. When the project is complete each student must give feedback to each other, as well as, evaluate themselves. Then once they have recived feedback, they must reflect on what others have said and work on creating a goal to better thier performance for next time. I really like this modle of teaching and there were some great examples of cooperative lesson taught by my collegues. Group one had an engaging project where the students got to write their very own constitutions for thier classroom. The student really got into it and had very complling ideas. Group three had the students do research on different causes in history that demanded a change in early America. The student got to become advocates themselves which was really exciting. Finishing up our feildwork experince group 4 had the students rearch different events that occure during the time of the Gold Rush. Each group created their own timeline to go along with thier reseach. I really liked this idea beacuse it gave the students the opportunity to really understand the order of events that lead to the significant events that they were studying. Overall, I beilive every group did very well. I really like how group three's lessons were all connected by the use of Petunia the Panda. It was a nice touch to incoporated her in all of the lessons. I also really liked how group four used their Mining for Gold behavior management plan that blended in seamlessly with their topic. Group one was very strong when it came to knowing thier content and rarely read off of the screen. I think my favorite part of feildwork would have to be our vocabulary game. All of the students found thier partners in the first round. Our game ran a bit long and we had to cut it short, leavinng four pairs without being able to present, but I feel like that was a great learning experince that I could draw from in the future. It has been a long few months of feildwork and I am gald it is over, but I will miss this class of awesome fifth-graders. Congratualtions everyone!