MTTC Mentor: Mindy Woods 

Cognitive Coach: Cynthia Wall 
Date: Saturday, July 14, 2007 
Source: Face-to-Face, Present During Mentoring Session

Mindy's Professional Goal for Cynthia to observe:

Refine my cognitive coaching skills to include active listening.

1. Refine my ability to ask open ended questions.
2. Refrain from interrupting the teacher during a conference.

Observation Transcript: (observed by Cynthia Wall as Cognitive Coach)
MTTC mentor Mindy Woods with teacher/mentee, Julie.

Mindy (as Coach/Mentor)

Julie (as Teacher/Mentee)

 

And what I wanted to talk to you today was, you’ve had a chance to look at the lesson plan and everything we’ve gone through.  Do you have any concerns when we actually put the lesson into implementation, what are your concerns?

My concern is me learning how to do all the fancy technology things.  Not the kids they will probably already know how to do it or will pick it up very quickly, but me learning how to do it is my concern.  I am more than willing to learn though.

So if we do some lessons where they do an audio thing where together you build a couple other lessons where you have an audio project and you learn those skills through those would that help any?

Yes, so we could kind of build up to this big project where they incorporate everything, yes, yes

Not just, would you rather it be something in terms of a lesson for the kids or a lesson for you to show them?

Both, let me show the kids in a lesson and then have them do something small on their own, just so that I know they know how to do it and are comfortable working with it before we jump into this.

The other thing that I wanted to talk about is the timeline we are giving kids for completion.  Do you think that our time, if we go where we’ve done an example of everything before hand? 

Right.   

Do you think that a 2 week timeline is going to work with this lesson? 

Yes. Because it is building, the basic information that they are going to need to know is built upon throughout the year and I always refer this is going to affect them in 100 years when the civil war breaks out.  Or this is starting now and it is just going to keep building. So all the basic information about the causes they’ll know, what they will need time to do is just go and do some more in depth research.  And I think with the classes with the computer room and we have computers in our room and internet research.  And I think that will be more than enough time, I think it will be the perfect amount of time for them to put together a presentation.  They may have to meet outside of class once or twice but it shouldn’t be anything that is overwhelming that they can’t get done. 

Do you anticipate having any students based on classes you have had before that would have problems with this?

 No because what I would try to do is divide the groups up so that their varied abilities and levels, let put it that way,  so that if I know some kids are weak in technology or doing research or in their academic, maybe they don’t have a good record of doing homework or things like that I am going to put them with someone who’s  better who will help them so all the groups ability levels will be spread out across each person in the group, so that hopefully the ones who already know how to do this or pick it up very quickly can help the ones who take a little bit more time.  I think if I pick the groups I will not let the kids pick their own groups, I think if I pick the groups for them we’ll have a better result in the end.

What about presentations, the kids doing their presentations do you have any problems?

No they love to do presentations, anytime they can get up and talk and showoff it is a good thing umm getting some of the quieter ones to speak up I can solve that problem by making each group member be a part of the presentation saying you have to add at least a minute or 30 seconds or you have to present part of this project everybody in the group has to speak

What about the question and answer session we were talking about doing at the end of this?

I think it is great, um I think we can do it the kids questioning the other kids on their specific presentation and also they can question me if they have any further questions about what could we have done right, what could we have done better, what was to much.  I think the more kids hear from other kids they are put in that position if they are doing the presentation ok, well I know I have to do this or I know I have to explain this a little better, the way I explained it, it is not going to be clear to them.  So I think, you learn by doing so I think as they practice giving these presentations they will realize what is involved and who your audience is, who you have to hit in each of the groups

What about the, you know the one thing we haven’t done on the lesson in terms of the presentation is set a time limit?

Yeah, um we have 1 day for class presentations, we have 5 groups, the causes of the civil war, each group is going to have a different cause, they are not really involved not super involved, there is just a little extra information and facts that the kids can add to it and backup and give samples um show evidence of their research on the internet there is nothing, there is a few things they are going to add to the cause to make it better understood by the other students. Um but I don’t think it is going to take up a lot of the time that we are not going to have enough time, if we do run out of time for a specific class, we can always extend it  a day, but there is only going to be 5 groups total so our classes are 50 minutes long that’s 10 minutes a group I think that would be enough, when we get to the question and answer we may say that for on the day of the presentation have the students that are listening maybe write down some questions we can get to later if we don’t have time, or maybe even have just a day where we go and review since it is going to be a visual presentation we can go back and kind of look at what groups did and if kids had specific questions they want to ask about a different topic or something they said then they can do that or they can just ask me but I think that if they as we go along I may tell them if they have a question just write it down and then at the end of the presentations if you have questions for these groups we can address those at the end.  As far as their technology, I don’t have any qualms about them, a lot of the kids come to class knowing how to do most of this, the word processing, desktop publishing, multimedia, they have a lot of resources at home they can use um I am amazed at what they bring to me for their basic little projects, just making sure they use technology that can be used at school, because sometimes theirs is a little more updated than ours to put it nicely, anyways.

It is.

Just to make sure it will show at school um that we can get it to work, and that I think they won’t have any problems with the technology part of it, I have no concerns over that.  I liked this project also because it wasn’t me standing up there talking to the kids the whole time.  Basically what I am going to do is give them their groups and their topic and maybe have to show them 1 or 2 things on the technology part of it but other than that it is up to them,  they do the research on the internet, they put information together, and it is more of a student based learning lesson rather than a teacher based learning lesson where I just stand up there and teach the whole time, they are going to learn how to put together information that will help them not only in social studies but also in science or langue arts or math or wherever they go, they can go back this is technology they can use in all their classes too. 

What is the thing you have the most concern in terms of the lesson, content, the technology, appraising the lesson?

 I think appraising the lesson, because it’s sometimes it is subjective and while they may hit on the right answer maybe it is not exactly the way I would like them to learn it or um maybe they leave one or two things out and trying to be subjective on those is difficult, but I think if we develop a scoring guide for their presentation I think that’ll  take care of  a lot of that subjectiveness because they are also going to turn in a hard copy of what they did, we’ll have the audio, we’ll have the visual and I think with all three of those coming together I think it will be more clear cut as far as the grading process

Do you think that for each of the different causes we need to come up with?

Yes, yeah, there is going to be specific information for each cause they will have to hit on and by the students knowing that in advance, this is what I am looking for you have to touch on each of these things that will be part of the introduction in the instructions to them. Ok, if you are doing the economy you have to tell these specific things so that when they give their presentation, I will have that scoring guide for that specific cause in front of me and as they mention each one I can OK, they did that, they did that, and all I have to do is listen and watch but I am listening really to make sure they cover all the things.  They will know exactly what they need to hit on before they even go up there, before they even get their lesson.

Is that something we still need to create for this?

Yes yeah and I can, I'll have to sit down and look the specific things and go back through the TEKS and also kind of just write everything down and compile all of it up and then once the project is mentioned give each student a handout that tells the goals, the TEKS that are going to be covered and the things they need to have in it, you will be graded on this, and under this you have to have this fact, this fact, this fact, this fact, it helps guide them through their, putting their presentation together, OK we've got to say this and this and this and this so it gives them a plan, a game plan to go on, they know exactly what they need to do and they can put it together however they want to as long all of it is in there

What about the visual part of it, having three different choices (???freedom of choices???) how do you think that is going to work with the kids?

The kids like to have choices as far as what they can do because some are more at ease putting something together on their own and then presenting it to the class while others are more comfortable performing, it just depends on the kids, and I think giving them a choice thats where they are going to get their choices and where they are going to have some freedom to decide what they want to do, because I am choosing the groups and I am going to assign the cause, they get to choose how they want to put that together and I think by telling them this is your product it needs to be an example of what you can do, to your best ability, don't do something that you can't do as well as something else. For a lot of our projects we do give them choices. If you are an artist you can do an art project, because I know you are going to do better on that because you like doing that. So by giving them a lot of or not a lot but various choices they have some kind of freedom

That's pretty much it.