Board Work Reflection

I have recently been observed by my Content-area Coordinator. I had expressed that I wanted to
try some new ideas on how the board is utilized for note taking and for making connections. I wanted to
make the change because I had observed my CT using a Powerpoint-type way of taking notes, but once
the students finished writing a slide he moved on and did not allow the notes to be up on the board
throughout the entirety of the class. I wanted to treat my lesson as more of a story, so I decided to make
some changes.
The change: I wanted to use the board almost like a story board. I decided to have some notes prewritten on the board. This way, as a class we could fill in the important aspects of the lesson. It would
also save me time so that I did not have to write every not on the board word for word. It also gave the
students an outline of the lesson before we even started. I left room in the middle of the board to
project the Desmos online graphing calculator so that we could do some exploration with the equations
of lines.
The effect: I think the lesson went well. I also think that the students benefitted from having all of the
notes from the lesson on the board at once. It allowed us to make connections across the board and
everything was laid out for the student, they just needed to put the pieces together. The Desmos online
graphing calculator is a huge help. We could instantly see whether lines exhibited the behaviors we
wanted or if they did not. Overall I thought that the lesson went very well and that the new board layout
improved the students learning and my own teaching.