On Monday I went to West Perry High School to do a visit with my cooperating teachers and teach a LifeKnowledge lesson. The class I was teaching ended up being the 3rd period Large Animal Science class (a class that I will be teaching in the spring).
Overall, the lesson went well. I chose the lesson "The Need for Leaders". This lesson is designed to teach students 3 main topics: what is a leader, why do we need leaders, and how can they be leaders.
As I was teaching the lesson, I felt as though I was extremely rushed to get to the next section. This lesson was intended to last 50 minutes the way they wanted it taught, but I believe this lesson should take an hour if we want the students to actually get the content and understand what we are talking about. It seemed like every 5 minutes we were doing something different.
After the class, Mrs. Miller told me that she was impressed with how engaged the students were, she was not expecting them to be as engaged for a few different reasons. One main reason was that the students were all ready to leave for thanksgiving break. Some of the feedback that the students gave me made it obvious that this lesson needed more time. The majority of the students wrote on their papers that they wish the lesson had gone a little bit slower, or they had more time to share out their ideas and plan out what they were doing more. The rest of the feedback I received was more focused on my own performance. A lot of the positive feedback was that I did very well projecting my voice in the classroom I was in (it was a back room of the shop where sound did not travel well) and that the instructions I gave were very clear and they knew exactly what I expected them to do.
Overall the lesson went well. I received a lot of good feedback from the students and Mrs. Miller; and I got the opportunity to meet the students in one of my classes for the spring. The only issue that I really ran into was that the lesson was very rushed to get finished and still have time to get the feedback I needed.
Matt, it is awesome to hear you had positive feedback on effective characteristics of teaching such as clarity. It sounds like you utilized your strengths and assessed your opportunities fro growth well. I think the timing will come with more practice this spring.
ReplyDeleteMatt, it is awesome to hear you had positive feedback on effective characteristics of teaching such as clarity. It sounds like you utilized your strengths and assessed your opportunities fro growth well. I think the timing will come with more practice this spring.
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