Inquiry Lesson Fieldwork Reflection

As of today, group three has now successfully completed our fieldwork obligation for ED 2520.  Unfortunately, we were not able to get much work from the students who joined us.  One of them was not present for our direct instruction lesson, and the other student did not seem very interested in the inquiry lesson.  However, I would still call this session successful because we were able to have a constructive discussion based on the material. 

I was very excited to teach this second lesson, because it was my idea that we based it on.  I thought it would be so fun to have the students pretend we were detectives solving a crime.  My group members helped me bring it to life, and helped me present it to the class.  Our lesson began almost the same as last time.  We re-introduced ourselves, reviewed our topic, and yes, completed the post-assessment we didn’t have time to get through during direct instruction.  We captured the students’ attention by telling them crimes have been committed, and we need their help to solve them.  We also introduced our four suspects for each of the crimes:

1. Wesley, the fire-breathing dragon

2. Finn, the flooding rain cloud

3. Ruth, the rising sea level wave

4. Willow, the water-sucking sun

Basically, our inquiry lesson was an extravagant matching game.  Look at the pictures, find clues, match a “suspect” with a crime scene.  The form of assessment we chose to use for this lesson was a crime scene report the would allow students to give their answers and reasoning behind it. 

Each person in the group took turns presenting a crime scene photo and assisting the students in filling out a crime scene report. We made sure to confirm or deny each student’s guess before moving on to the next crime scene.  I thought it was going well! 

The independent practice for this lesson was to create a 2-3 minute FlipGrid video explaining to the class how they came to conclusions about each crime scene.  We set a timer and give them 15 minutes to complete this, and included a rubric so they knew the standards we were looking for.  One student completed the FlipGrid meeting all standards, but the other had left the meeting at this point.  For a closure activity, we did “2 roses and a thorn”, which was directed to have the students reflect on two things they learned from the inquiry activity, and ask one question they still had about the secondary consequences.

Fortunately, we were able to use our time wisely this session and got everything done that we intended to.  I hope the students had more fun than it seemed to myself and my group members.  However, the other people in my class seemed to enjoy the lesson, and I had fun teaching it, so I would call it a success.