Exemplary Teacher Observation Reflection Form

(Teacher can be from same or different grade band)

Teacher Candidate for Science Endorsement: _____Catherine Chaviano____________

Exemplary Teacher Initials: _______________________________________________

School: __Mount Bethel Elementary School____ Grade: ___2_______________

Lesson Topic: ____Stars – The sun appears to be the brightest but is not___________

Write a brief summary of your experiences observing this lesson, addressing the
following questions:

 In your opinion, what went well? What could be tweaked/improved? (Cite specific
examples. You can note specific things such as differentiation if it occurred, use
of technology, inquiry-based, etc).

The students entered the classroom and the teacher had images from Google Sky on
the smart board to engage them. She did not tell them what they were looking at
and asked them to speculate. The students guessed correctly that they were looking
at stars. They then took a few moments to explore different galaxies.

The teacher asked to students to think of questions they had about stars (different
from other observation when inquiry was teacher directed) and observations they
had made. The students wrote their questions on post it notes. The teacher then
talked about the attributes used to describe stars, and they shared and labeled each
post it by attribute type while posting on OWL chart.

Teacher then did informal pre-assessment by asking the students what they thought
was the largest star and waited for the students to respond “the sun.” She took a
tangerine and grapefruit and asked students to hold up one or two fingers to answer
which they predicted was representation of the sun. I liked this way of response. The
teacher was able to get a response from all students quickly and in a “safe” way.
The students holding the two balls were told to walk down the hall with the balls,
and the class followed to observe. The small ball carrier was asked to stop and the
large one continued until it appeared the large ball was smaller than the close one.
The teacher asked again, which represents the sun using the finger response. She
explained why the closer/smaller ball looks larger due to scale, and that our sun is
medium sized star, but looks larger because we are closer to it.

The students were then divided into small groups and given balls to duplicate the
activity and recorded themselves.
I think the lesson went very well and gave students experiential learning of scale to
help them reason through the explanation of why the sun looks so large, but could
be smaller than other stars.

 How well were the lesson’s student performance objectives attained?

The students used ipads to record phots/videos explaining the claim that the sun is
not the largest star. Again, the lesson provided effective evidence that students had
indeed met expectations using technology resources.