Wow! I actually taught a lesson! After teaching my lesson I must say that I feel as though I accomplished something great, it also showed me that this IS what i want to do with the rest of my life. The day before I felt anxious about whether my lesson was going to be good enough, are the students going to understand what i am talking about, will the learn anything. Once I actualy performed the lesson I learned that the students did understand and they even learned something new. This was a wonderful feeling and I want to share how I think I did on my lesson.
Overall I feel that I had a great teaching voice, I made sure that the students could hear and understand what i was saying. However trying to cue the students to quiet down was where i struggled. I am glad i went through this process so that I could understand that if i want to get the attention of my students I should not yell over them. Having a system that my class understands as a cue to quiet down will be important to have in my own classroom. Yelling did not work!
Activating their prior knowledge i felt was very successful, I was abe to get the students thinking of chemical reactions, the chemical equation, and the different types with a short introduction. I also was able to get the students thinking as scientists, I informed them that we are going to become scientists. I did not just list the steps of inquiry instead we went through them step by step as we were developing the experiment. I made sure they understood that now we are going to write our hypothesis, I asked question to help them development them and walked around the room to make sure they were on task. Then I initiated the experiment by saying "OK now we have our hypothesis. Lets test them" the students knew exactly what they were asked to do because it was written on the paper and they had my verbal cue. I made sure to walk around asking questions to keep them thinking like a scientist. I also make sure they were staying on task, gave them praise and academic feedback.
Through my observations you can see the difference immediatly in the students work. It was clear that some knew exactly what was expected and were able to go through each step without any support, where others needed a lot of support and guidence. Many of the students wrote in comeplete and clear sentences. Others wrote one word or it was very messy and hard to read. This shows the drastic difference in student work and allowed me to analyze the different amount of support i will need to provide each of my students. Closing the experiment the groups were able to present their findings and each group was able to provide the right answer with a great explaination as to why it was the specific reaction they chose.
IMPROVE! I believe there were two things that I needed to improve. The one thing I have already mentions which is a different way of getting my students attention. Instead of yelling and trying to talk over them, which was NOT working, I should have a system like turning off the lights or clapping. I also feel that to avoid confrontation I should have had the roles assigned to the students. I did not take into consideration that they are young and will fight over the roles. Assigning the roles will allow each student to get a new role, avoid conflict, and may even allow the quieter student to get a more dominant role.
Watching my peers teach was a wonderful experience, I was able to see different teaching styles and even get new ideas for when i am a teacher. Faith and Jennifer both successfully assigned roles and used a different system to get the students attention. Both of them gave wonderful introductory lessons, they engaged the students and asked diagnostic questions. There were somethings that I would have changes, for one i would make sure that i give clear directions to my students so that they understand the lesson. Also I will make sure they understand why i am asking specific questions. If the questions do not seem to relate to anything then they were asked for no reason. Both had great experiments that the students were highly engaged in. Overall GREAT JOB!
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