Co-teaching a Discovery Based Lesson

As part of my goal in education I discussed with my boss the possibility of co-teaching with teachers to increase the use of discovery-based lessons. Since I do not have my own classroom, it is difficult for me to create lessons and implement them in order to adjust them. I partnered with a former colleague and friend to implement a discovery-based lesson in her geometry classes. We planned out the lesson based on their unit progression and where the lesson would fall. I took their notes they originally planned to use for triangle similarity and this is where the lesson building began. I thought about what the students really needed to understand in order to use triangle similarity to solve problems. The overall concepts the students need to understand are what I based the discovery lesson on. While I knew the goal of the lesson, I changed the actual lesson several times since I debated making it hands on or technology based. I then could not decide if I wanted the students to create the triangles using a protractor and ruler or if I wanted to provide triangles for them to measure. I wanted this lesson to be minimal prep but high impact. I ultimately decided on providing triangles but having students sort the triangles as they see fit with their partner. We will then have a class discussion about the sorting before they begin measuring the triangles and discovering the similarities.

In the days and nights leading up to this lesson I found myself becoming very nervous and having mixed emotions. Don’t get me wrong, I am super excited to be teaming up with my friend and facilitating this lesson in her classroom, yet not being a classroom teacher in a year has let to “first day” nerves again. I want this lesson to go really well, yet I know if it doesn’t that only gives room to improve upon it. I am hopeful this will encourage her and others to design more lessons like this and see the ease in doing so. I am a believer that if you spend time building concepts, you need to spend less time on skills practice. I have designed and implemented lessons that build conceptual understanding since my second year of teaching yet I can’t help but want everything to be perfect. I hope my quick thinking in the classroom and the background knowledge of the students will help to guide if the lesson is not going the way I planned.

I am grateful for the opportunity to design and implement more discovery and conceptual lessons and hope to do so more in the future. My plan is to pair up with this teacher a few more times throughout this school year to ultimately reach more teachers as well. As humans it is our nature to learn at a deeper understanding by doing rather than being told. That is goal for this lesson.