Sheltered Lesson

The lesson in this video contained some of the elements of sheltered instruction. The lesson had clear objectives, it activated background knowledge, there was some focus on vocabulary and it was delivered very clearly. This was a social studies lesson about the Declaration of Independence.

The lesson opened with the teacher going over the objectives. The objectives were clearly written on the board. This was a good visual for the students. It seemed like the teacher was doing well making the directions clear for the class. The students had at least some background knowledge and the teacher activated this early in the lesson. The teacher asked questions and got some short answers. The students were able to make some comments about the Declaration of Independence. I do not feel she allowed for enough discussion in this part of the lesson.

The next part of the lesson focused on vocabulary. The teacher discussed the word grievances. She wrote the word on the board and discussed what it meant using several examples and synonyms. Once again I felt the teacher was doing too much of the talking. I think it would have been more effective to give an example and then have the students come up with some examples of their own. One of the key elements of the SIOP lesson plan is to allow for plenty of student interaction. It is difficult to even comment on the student interaction in this video because there really was very little.

Overall I did not feel this was the best example of a sheltered lesson. I would have liked to have seen what happened in the rest of the lesson. Since this was only the introduction I feel it is possible all of the student interaction, scaffolding and application were just not shown in the video.

I did some research on SIOP to better understand what this lesson was intended to be an example of.
The SIOP website http://www.siopinstitute.net/