The practicum student, Miriam Larson, taught her third lesson in an animal research unit at Dr. Howard Elementary. The lesson involved students choosing animal books to research. Some students had trouble being flexible in their book choices if their preferred animal was unavailable. The closing group activity of having students identify how many books at their table had contents pages did not work well with first graders, who need more structured group work. The cooperating teacher provided helpful feedback on managing student comments and modeling expectations to improve future lessons.

1. School Library Practicum: Excerpt
Dr. Howard Elementary
Cooperating Teacher: Pat Mathews
Practicum Student: Miriam Larson
Week 12: March 26-30
Lesson 3: Choose animal books
On Tuesday, I had my third lesson in the Animal Research Unit. This was the week that
they chose their animals so the idea was to give some quick reminders about how to
choose a book and then let them browse the options. Overall, the lessons went well and
it’s exciting to get a book in each student’s hands. There were a couple of things that
slowed me down and some lessons for me that will be helpful in future planning.
The first class came in and declared that they were tired, and I let this slow me down a
lot. I had them stretch a bit, I tried to get them psyched about the lesson we were about to
do, and they only repeated that they were tired. Pat remarked afterwards that often it’s
best just to acknowledge a comment like “I’m tired” and then move on. It is frustrating to
not have the flexibility to try something different, like do a bit of stretching, but maybe
it’s best to think about a way to integrate a comment into the existing lesson – something
as simple as “what do chimpanzees do when they are tired?” than try to make up
something different.
During the lesson, I demonstrated two guidelines I wanted them to keep in mind as they
chose their books: 1) find something that is challenging, 2) take turns looking at books.
I’ve appreciated Pat’s encouragement to use behavior modeling to set expectations before
an activity. I also enjoy I used one student in the front row to help me demonstrate
sharing and that got the whole class laughing. I had the student grab the book I was
holding and we started a tug of war. This is something I see in small ways when the
students are checking out, actually. But then I stopped and allowed the student to have
the book. I asked “I know that you are really interested in this book so I will let you have
it. Do you think you can tell me something about hedgehogs later?” Whoever was
demonstrating with me invariable got really serious and nodded solemnly.
I also did a brief demonstration to help kids look for books at their level. I pretended to
be a student who loved chimpanzees and picked up a book about chimpanzees. “Oh, I
already know everything about chimpanzees so this assignment will be easy! And I can
read this whole book in five second.” I asked students, “will you learn very much if you
follow this example?” In this way, I hoped they would be more flexible in their choice
and not just choose based on the animal they wanted to learn about.
When students got up to choose books, they did a good job of finding books relatively
quickly and not fighting over them. But some students did get upset if they had a
particular animal in mind and they could not find a book about that animal. It took some
cajoling to get them to settle on something else. After I saw this happen in the first class,

2. I made a point to mention to other classes that they should be flexible with their choices.
The last reflection I have about this lesson has to do with my closing activity. I wanted
students to identify how many books at their tables had a contents page. The idea was to
integrate a little bit of collaboration into a lesson otherwise focused on individual work.
However, my attempt didn’t work very well. Pat suggested afterwards that first graders
are not yet very good at group work. In other words, if I wanted them to have to figure
out how many people had contents pages, I would have had to break down the task into
smaller steps and help each group add up the results. As it was, I decided to alter the
question and just ask students to raise their hand if their book had a contents page. Then I
counted the number of hands at each table and announced the totals.