Week 4: Lessons

The schedule in our class is really becoming more of a routine. This makes it easier on us as pre-interns and on the students as well. The students can start expecting that we will be teaching lessons to them. We are now teaching a lesson each day we are there. I really like this because I feel like I am doing more than observing and supporting, I am actually teaching. Our mentor teacher is also allowing us to teach a variety of subjects. In the past, majority of what we have taught was reading lessons, but we hardly ever got experience teaching other subjects. I want to become more confident in other subjects and know I can only do so by practicing.

            We have also been doing a lot of little extra things on our class for some of our own assignments. We have given a class survey, taught our first pathwise lesson plan, and began planning for our lesson study and for our unit study.

To prepare for our unit study, we needed to think of a way to collect our students’ background knowledge on what we were going to teach. Our unit will fall into black history month and is focusing on black history through the arts. We decided to use a survey to find out what our students’ already know on this topic. “Surveys can give students a space to share their thoughts and opinions about a teaching technique or strategy, a unit, or their knowledge about a particular subject matter.” (Dana & Yendol-Hoppey. p. 92).  We were sure to emphasize that it was okay if they did not know but that they should try their best and guess if they thought they had any idea what the answer could be. I noticed that it was hard for a lot of the students to leave an answer blank, especially if they noticed a classmate was writing and had an answer. When I started to see wandering eyes, I told them that I wanted to know what they knew, not what their neighbor knew and that it was not a grade. We ended up with a variety of answers and know now what we need to focus on as we tech our unit.

As we teach more lessons. The students are beginning to get more comfortable with us being their teachers. I have noticed that the students are often whispering to their neighbors while we teach though. If it is brought up to stop talking the students will stop, but there are one or two who will continue to push it and keep talking. This is one of my pet peeves because I know that they are not only distracting me from my teaching, but are also distracting their peers from learning. I wonder if a no talking chart, or some kind of reward system for not talking while the teaching is talking would encourage students to stay quiet throughout a lesson?