Laura Agosto

Reflective Teaching Experience

04/05/16
Currently I teach a self-contained composition class at Mastery Charter Lenfest. My class
is composed of seven ninth graders, five tenth graders, and two eleventh graders. All of my
students are reading between a first and fifth grade reading level. Throughout the year I have
been trying to find the best practices to teach my students specific writing skills that they can
transfer across settings. Often I found that my students understood many of the concepts and
terms of writing, but struggled to produce them in their own writing.
Prior to taking this course I had tried a variety of strategies for both engaging my students
and ensuring growth in their writing. For most lessons I would have taught a writing strategy
through guided notes and review of exemplars before having the students apply the strategy
during their independent writing time (about 20 minutes per class period). I found that my
students were not able to apply the strategy and were lacking the deeper metacognitive
understanding of it. In this lesson about expanding and analyzing supporting details, I included
the instruction practice of explicit instruction and the best practice of writing time for students. I
chose the practice of explicit instruction because I wanted to show my students how to think
through using a specific strategy through a think aloud. Using a think aloud seemed to be a
perfect practice to engage my students on a metacognitive level with the process of writing.
Furthermore, it would push me to move beyond explaining the strategy to showing the mental
heavy lifting that goes into to applying it. Additionally, I wanted to ensure that students had their
daily time to engage with and practice their writing.
Overall the think aloud, we do, and you do portions of the lesson were successful.
The whole class (myself included) was pushed to think metacognitively about how to effectively

expand and analyze supporting details. Additionally, the questioning was scaffolded to ensure
that students did not simply watch me analyzing my supporting details, but also understood why
I was doing what I was doing and how they could take steps to engage in the same thought
process independently. This scaffolded questioning continued throughout the we do portion,
resulting in greater student understanding of how to apply the strategy in their own writing.
The portions of the lesson that I am hoping to revise throughout the fourth report period
of this year are the independent writing time and engaging my students with more targeted
questioning during the lesson. Although students understood the goal and their ability to analyze
their supporting details improved greatly, they struggled to stay on task and focused during the
independent writing time. This part of the lesson was not as successful as I had hoped because
my students struggle to stay focused for longer periods of time. In order to improve this portion
of our daily lesson I am trying to find ways to insert checkpoints or brain breaks so that they can
pause from writing and check in with each other. With regards to engaging my students with
more targeted questioning, many of my students lost interest during portions of the think aloud
because I was not actively engaging them the whole time. This was one of the key pieces of
feedback that my observer gave me. She noted that although my think aloud was detailed and
effective, student engagement waned since they were not being questioned frequently enough.
Her feedback helped me think of new ways to engage my students during the think aloud. Her
suggestions to have them participate in a turn and talk has helped me since then, as well as
prepping a copy for parts of the think aloud ahead of time. Additionally, her suggestion to have
students review an exemplar paragraph that sets the bar for what they are eventually striving to
create is something I would definitely incorporate if I taught this lesson again. In fact, I have

incorporated it in other lessons since then. Showing them the end goal is important because it
will help them evaluate their own work and will set a high level of expectations.
It is important that I continue to reflect upon how to improve the independent writing
portion of my class, as well as the questioning during the think aloud because both are key
components of best practices. My students benefit greatly from explicit instruction and daily time
devoted to writing. As a result, it is imperative that these practices be planned well and executed
effectively.