Standard 4- The teacher understands the central concepts, tools of inquiry, and structures

of the discipline.
Teachers must effectively manage, understand the standards and content and encourage
inquiry from the students for a meaningful lesson to take place where students have the
opportunity to master the content. To demonstrate my understanding if Standard 4, I have
included a 4th grade lesson plan on math and dance standards. I taught this lesson plan via Zoom
for a movement class that is meant to connect to classroom content. In this lesson, students had
the opportunity to create movements that corresponded to math vocabulary words in an effort to
remember the definitions.
This artifact supports standard 4 because this lesson plan helps students deepen their
knowledge of academic vocabulary by creating representations with movements. Dancing and
moving can often feel strange for students, but by creating a movement to represent a vocabulary
word, students are creating new representations on key ideas of math concepts. This lesson was
meant to be second lesson to an introduction to the geometry standard, “Draw and identify lines
and angles, as well as classify shapes by properties of their lines and angles.” Because this was a
movement class, students needed to question how geometry vocabulary could be represented as a
movement with their whole bodies, while still taking in to account the main concepts of the
vocabulary words.
I taught this lesson multiple times to different 4th grade classes, and each time I taught the
lesson I changed aspects and gained insight. From this lesson I have learned that when
introducing new concepts, it is better to take the time and not overwhelm students with too many
new ideas. In the future, I will slow down or stop lessons if I think students are not understanding
the concepts presented. I have learned that it is more important for a student to fully understand a
concept, then to slightly understand a lot. This lesson was very intensive on math vocabulary,
and I could have given students more time to explore new concepts in more depth. After this
lesson was taught, and the students began learning about geometry in their class, I received
feedback that students had remembered their movements in class.