Information Processing TIPR

1. For this assignment, I observed an eighth grade class learning about the Holocaust. To start off class, the students came in, and pulled out their journals. As the teacher began class, she asked the students to give themselves expectation points. This is a good example of attention. The teacher requires them to pay attention to what they are doing very quickly. This helps the students get their brains working from sensory memory to working memory. For the teacher to have the students check themselves on easy perception things really fast, and then start into the lesson allows the teacher to help them move from stimulus-driven attention to controlled/focused attention. Since they have paid attention to the stimuli in the room, they are able to focus their attention on the lesson that the teacher has prepared. The teacher then engaged her students in elaborative rehearsal throughout the entire lesson. She had her students write down the essential question of the class period in their notebooks, "I can identify conflict and characterization in Act 2 Scene 1 of The Diary of Anne Frank". The teacher asked the students to identify conflict and characterization which they had learned the previous week. This helps the students move those vocabulary words to long-term memory.  The teacher then engaged her students in encoding as she helped them remember the meanings of the vocabulary words and then make connections to practice as they see it in the play. The teacher also paid attention to the wait time that students need when asking questions. She put four questions on the board for the students to look for while they read the scene aloud. This helps with repetition and getting the information into long-term memory. Throughout the reading, she would stop the class and have a student give a summary of what they were learning. Allowing the summaries was another technique she employed towards her goal of repetition  and achieving long-term memory. She would also mention, "you should now be able to answer two out of the four questions on the board". This helps maintain attention. After the reading was done, she had them rate themselves on if they could answer the essential question positively. She then gave them an exit ticket to further question if they could answer the essential question. All of these little things she did throughout her lesson helped develop their working memory and their long-term memory. 
2. I think the student's needs in this area really just lie in attention. The students sometimes had a hard time being able to pay attention to the longer reading that they did. They left their seats once, but other than that, they were in their seats, not talking to anyone around them. Because their class periods are 80 minutes, and it was the last class of the day, they needed some more movement to stay engaged. The teacher often had to stop and remind the students that they need to be quiet and get rid of side conversations. I also think that letting the students know when there was key information up front would help their working memory kick it into gear, as well as allowing them to encode  more effectively.
3. In order to combat some of these things in my mini lesson, I think that I will have to have more hands-on activities. This will help with their attention, visuospatial sketchpad, and encoding skills. Allowing the students to see more visuals would help them not call out so much. I think also asking more questions of the class, and giving a couple more seconds of wait time would help the students realize that I am asking a question instead of continuing on with my lesson.