On April 4, 2014, I presented a lesson focused on the assigned reading of Act I of Raisin in the Sun. The main goal of the course was to have students use a higher level of thinking to analyze the text and find the themes and deeper meaning of the piece. This reflection will focus on some of the strengths and weaknesses of the lesson and my teaching. One of the main challenges of the lesson was how to use the time effectively to cover all of the objectives in my plan. This lesson was strained by the time constraints of a 50-minute class period and a quiz that took up 25 minutes of class time. When planning the lesson, I thought it would be possible to place students in groups to ask close reading questions. I quickly discovered, after doing poetry parentheses at the beginning of class and then discussing the main points of Act I, that there was very little time to actually do the activity. The students were only in groups of less than 10 minutes and couldn't really look at the text too closely before I had to move them forward. I felt this posed several problems with the presentation o...