Student Teaching Reflection 14

This week was fairly uneventful, but my mentor teacher was out on Thursday. For the Conceptual Biology classes, this meant that her co-teacher took the lead that day, and it was nice for me to see a different style of teaching. She kept many things the same since she uses the same or similar lesson plans for her own conceptual biology class, but I was interested to see her use of exit tickets in this class. My mentor teacher had been out Wednesday and Thursday, and her co-teacher had taught the students about Punnett squares and inheritance patterns. As the exit ticket on Thursday, she had the students create a Punnett square for a specific scenario and tell her what percentage of the offspring would be a certain genotype. She had the students turn these slips in, but did not require them to put their names on them. Rather than use these exit tickets to assess the students, she used them to assess herself. She went through them to make sure the students were understanding the concepts to see if she needed to adjust her lessons. I thought that this was an excellent alternative use for formative assessments, and I think that it is something that I will adopt in my own teaching.