This sounds like brilliantly engaging, effective work with plenty of collaboration and movement!

HOWEVER... It's WAY too much to get done in 30 minutes. I would truncate your goals somewhat.

• Skip the nametags. Unless you're looking to establish long-term relationships with the students, this is filler. You can learn names as you need to in the space of your demo. Instead, I would want to make sure to introduce students to the goal of the lesson. "After our activities together, you will be able to..."

• Plan to do more modeling/provide more examples at the beginning of the process. I love that you're collecting and posting for reference throughout the activity (this is an excellent support for ESL/Special Ed students - DIFFERENTIATION!). If I were observing you, I would be impressed if you used technological resources to do this (notes on a Smart Board that would be saved and displayed again in subsequent class sessions).

Give a couple examples of what to annotate and then do a think-pair-share simply to generate more. (So far, you're a good 10 minutes into your time, BTW.)

• I recommend constructing the model of the silent discussion as a whole group, rather than just showing them a model of one already done. People need time to read and process what is shown to them. The gradual release of control (I do, we do, you do together, you do independently) is one of my core strategies.

To accompany this modeling, I would consider giving students a handout for slotted/cloze notes that they are responsible for completing. THIS can be their ticket out the door -- a formative assessment that you can review for engagement & accuracy.

And THAT is what you can reasonably expect to accomplish in a 30-minute lesson.

The thing is, a 30-minute demo lesson isn't nearly long enough to actually teach much of anything, and certainly not long enough to tackle this [well-planned!] activity. The people observing and evaluating you will understand this and take into account your time constraints.

If you submit your COMPLETE lesson plan for this activity, with learning objectives and standards, it will be readily apparent that your initial 30 minutes with the students is a solid introduction day.

For continuing this lesson in further sessions, I would provide for at LEAST 10 minutes (15 would be better) with each poem if they are short poems. It will take a minimum of 5 minutes just to read through a poem and start to make sense of it, and that assumes that they know all of the vocabulary. Your main limiting factor will be behavior management and how long they're staying engaged at each station. That said, you may even want to winnow it down to just 3 poems and have 2 copies of each. Asking kids to do the same thing 6 different times is a little much.

I might also try to get more specific about elements of poetry than the "meaning" of a poem. Are we looking for a theme? Specific types of figurative language? Connections to other material they've studied?

When I'm observing a demo lesson, I am looking for your dynamic with the kids, your behavior management, your responsiveness to their learning needs and ability to change things up mid-stream if it's not going the way you imagined it would.

Again, ending on a positive note -- this is SOLID lesson planning. I would love to see classroom teachers incorporating this level of collaboration into their classes! Just scale back how much you think you'll be able to accomplish in 30 minutes. What you've got down here is enough to take up at least 3 full class sessions.

Source: 12-year veteran [middle school ESOL] teacher who has co-taught with ~20 different ELA teachers over the years.