Trigonometry/Pre-Calculus Class

The first lesson that I taught in Mr. Robert Speicher’s Trigonometry/Pre-Calculus class involved a factoring technique called the “Rational Root Theorem”. I taught this lesson in conjunction with the Explicit Direct Model of Teaching. For the beginning of my set, I showed my students a video from YouTube called “The Exponent Rules Song” in order to activate their prior knowledge of exponents and to appeal to my students who were musicians.
I then presented a graphic organizer on the white board that showed the four rules of exponents by calling on four random students who did not appear to be listening to the song to explain one of the rules of exponents. (The graphic organizer was a simple square divided into four smaller squares. Each of

I now feel that I have a much better understanding of how much time certain activities will take, in particular independent practice assignments in the form of group work. I also felt that I did a better job at motivating the students to want to learn the material through the use of my YouTube video to start the set. This lesson was the first of a new unit and I feel that they are motivated to learn the material throughout the rest of the unit. Lastly, I feel that I was more prepared to handle spontaneous classroom interruptions such as an announcement bell and the classroom phone ringing while still giving the students the ability to progress even while I had to take care of these

I really feel that this lesson would have been more effective and that my students would have demonstrated understanding in an overt manner (like in my first lesson when I had them write summaries) that I could measure if I had those ten extra minutes to really emphasize the independent practice problems and allow the students to synthesize their learning in the form of a formative assessment. Due to time constraints of having to delete ten minutes of the lesson, I had to give up my ability to check for student understanding at the end of the lesson. Even though this understanding is extremely valuable to me, sometimes I need to make sure that I can cover the topics that I need to be able to cover in the time constraints with my students. Not every lesson can close in an overt fashion.
Another thing that I would change in this particular lesson involves the idea of promoting student evaluation of the concept of transforming rational exponents into root form. The next time that I would teach this lesson, I believe that I would give students numerous problems where they have to convert from rational exponent form to root form or the other way around. At the end of this massed practice, students would need to generalize the concept of transforming from rational exponent form to root