Problem Solving Approach Lab Reflection

This week I got pretty good feedback on my problem-solving approach lesson. We had to develop a lesson that challenged students to solve a problem. Sounds like an easy task (or at least I thought so), but I struggled to create a lesson for this lab. I spent hours just narrowing down a topic because I couldn't think of a great way for students to solve a problem. This reflection is based almost completely on my preparation process and not the presentation of the lesson because that is where I struggled.

During my lesson planning I kept thinking: Should I have them design a landscape? Is that even a problem? Should I have them diagnose a sick animal? Would that be too in-depth for high school level? Should I have students identify potential pollutants? I jumped around quite a bit until I finally just picked one. I decided not to perform the pollutants lesson because I already mentioned it in class earlier this week and thought I should pick something different. It was a toss-up between the other two, literally. I actually just flipped a coin and decided on animal disease diagnosis.

My struggles didn't end there. I spent way more time through this whole process than I anticipated. Hours went by and I finally picked a lesson. My next struggle was finding information that wasn't beyond high school level, but yet would challenge students. I ended up just creating my own case study for students. A lot of information out there is designed to challenge College level students and Veterinary students. So I designed the lesson from scratch because it was easier than trying to simplify any case studies I did find.

Facilitating group discussion

Here's the basics to my final created lesson: Students briefly learned/reviewed the physical examination process of an animal. We then role played that I (the teacher) was a pet owner and the students were veterinarians. Throughout the review of the physical examination process they were to ask questions and observe my pet dog, Molly. They used FFA Vet Science CDE disease packets to individually diagnose Molly and then worked in a  group to make a final decision on what they thought was wrong with Molly.  I designed the lesson with one disease in mind knowing that students could potentially diagnose differently. In this exercise there were no tests so they had to diagnose the dog based only on symptoms they heard from the questions they asked.

My seemingly endless hours of stressing over this one lesson plan did pay off in the end. I got pretty good feedback from my peers and professor on the student problem-solving activity. I still need to work on that gosh darn enthusiasm and my transitions could use some help, but at least the planning paid off.

For future lessons I think more time should be put into the flow of the lesson and not worry so much about narrowing down a topic. More time into the planning process will benefit my lesson presentation ultimately. 

After all, "Those who fail to plan, plan to fail." - Winston Churchill