Concept Development Lesson Reflection

Today I presented my lesson plan for the concept development lesson on fossil fuels. I believe my lesson went exactly as I had hoped for. I am new to lesson planning and presenting but this is the first time that I have had a lesson go exactly as planned and the results turned out even better than I expected. Usually I prepare for changes and expect the need to think on my feet and be flexible when lessons don’t go as planned. 

In this lesson I presented the group of seventh grade boys with a short text and an image about fossil fuels. I asked them to read it and think about it. After giving them a chance to do that I asked them what they thought about fossil fuels and if there was any connection to their comic book story about an oil spill. I asked them to look at the image and tell me what they saw. One of the students said that people using fossil fuels are “taking advantage of” the natural resource. I ask how this related to the story line and they told me that if people were not taking advantage of the fossil fuels then a ship would not need to be carrying them and there would not have been an oil spill in the first place. They also told me, when I asked what a solution to this problem could be, that using renewable resources such as wind, solar, water and nuclear power could solve the problem. 

Then together as a group I helped them make changes to their story to include the new concept they had developed. By including the new ideas they talked about it brought their storyline to a complete conclusion. No longer did the story just consist of an oil spill and clean up but instead included a connection to environmental sustainability and solutions to an environmental problem. I was very happy with the outcome of this lesson and excited by the engagement of the students. Even the one student who is consistently off task was engaged and brought in the ideas about nuclear power and when I shared what I knew about the concept he was curious which was very exciting! 

This was my first time presenting a lesson using the concept development method and I was a bit nervous about it, wondering if I would be able to present a concept well enough for my students to develop the ideas without direct instruction. Based on my results from this lesson I a looking forward to using this method again in the future and developing my own skills at using the method.