Field Experience - Day 1 form Unit Plan

I am currently a teacher of the visually impaired at a public high school. I work in a SELPA classroom and have about 12 students on my caseload. I support my students in most every subject and I am their primary teacher for mathematics.

I have taught the Geometry unit on right triangles to some of them, but for the unit plan from week two, I totally revamped the entire process. I practiced the pre-assessment from Day 1 with five of my students. Two of them had already taken geometry, two of them are currently in a geometry class, and one of them has not yet taken geometry and is in an algebra 1 class. After doing the pre-assessment practice with my students, I continued to the Day 1 lesson.

The lesson had to be adapted in major ways for students who are either blind or have low vision. I have taught students who are visually impaired for five years now, so that part was not difficult and the student are all academic students with visual impairment being their only disability. This lesson just took some extra preparation to teach it to my students. I have some tactile examples of acute, obtuse and right triangles that I was able to use to get some points across. So the reflection from this lesson will be as accurate as possible.

We followed my Day 1 lesson plan all the way through. All of the students were already familiar with the idea of the Pythagorean Theorem, but a few of them did not know that it can also be used to classify triangles as acute, obtuse, or right. We went through the interactive lecture and I informally assessed each of the students' understanding with direct and strategic questions. We worked together through some guided practice problems as well. The student centered activity is a group activity, so the five students did it together. I had adapted the application problem to included a tactile representation of a volleyball net. The students who had been exposed to this type lesson before knew exactly what to do and lead the group, sometimes to a point of dominating the students who may not have quite understood the concept of making sure the triangles had right angles. 

Since the students were helping me out with this field test, I reduced the number of practice problems for homework to only 10. They really liked the idea that they only had to correctly answer 7 to get "full credit." (I may start this idea right away in my regular classes.) All of the students actually received full credit. A couple students were confident and only completed 7 problems. The rest completed all the problems and got at least 7 correct. 

REFLECTION
I was very comfortable teaching this lesson. I have taught this content before, but not in this particular way. Fortunately, I already have a rapport with these students. They have been with me for as long as they have been in high school, so it went pretty smoothly. Some things that went well:
- using a video clip as a motivator
- adapting the lesson for special needs students
- making sure to include a real life application
- the new style of homework. assigning more problems that necessary for full credit. Students loved this.

What may need to be re-evaluated:
- the group activity was dominated by two students. The other three did not get to participate very much. In observing and conducting an informal observation, it was impossible to tell if these students were really comprehending how to apply the lesson to a real life situation. In the future, I would consider letting the students work out the problem on their own for a couple minutes and then entering into groups to discuss and compare their solutions.