Stop Learning One Does Not

Well… Monday didn’t quite go as I originally planned. I came up with so many things to make the lesson interesting all of which I never got to. I’ve taught before but something about being timed threw me off my game. This ended up being one of my worst teaching performances. Have you ever practiced for something and your keep repeating to yourself “whatever you do don’t…” and you practice so you won’t do whatever you said you weren’t gonna do but as soon as you go to do it for real you do it anyways. That’s exactly what happened to me on Monday. I had made the lesson out to be discussion based teaching which worked out a little bit until half way through. About half way through you look at the clock and realize that, according to your original plan, you’re way behind and you don’t do it on purpose but you switch to autopilot mode. You get so consumed with covering everything in the lesson plan that you don’t stop to make sure the students understand any of what you’re saying. There’s a saying “everyone has a plan until they get hit” well I guess to an extent that can be applied to teaching as well. I had a plan until I got in front of the class and all my plans went out the window. There is something I learned from all of this though: it’s not the end of the world if you don’t finish your lesson plan, it’s more important that the students understand the material.

            Today I learned something interesting, well interesting to me anyways, about planning a class lesson. I’ve never wanted to cover just the basics of American history; skimming over it to make sure I cover all U.S. history at the expense of going more in-depth with my students. I learned about something called a flipped classroom where part of the learning happens outside of the classroom. Where you can post videos about the lesson for the next day online, the lesson on the video covers the next day’s lesson broadly. This allows for the teacher to go more in-depth over the topics covered in the video. This allows the class to spend more time in discussion and more importantly make sure the student’s understand. A high school in Michigan was in the 5% worst schools in the state but when they switched it over to a flipped classroom it became one of the best in the state. It allows teachers more time to help students understand the material and to have discussion, in class activities, or time to do homework with the teacher there for help.

To The Point Of No Return...

            This week in class has been interesting to say the least with almost everyone presenting their lesson to the class. I can’t lie, getting to act like little kids to create a more realistic representation of what these future teachers will be dealing with has been a hoot. It’s fun to sometimes annoy our fellow classmates by acting like five year olds, as long as it doesn’t get out of hand or create too much of a distraction, under the guise of presenting them with what to expect when they actually start teaching. But I know this is a doubled edged sword and that whatever I dished out on them I will get back in return on Monday. But this is a good exercise on how to deal with the age group of students we’ll be teaching. Brittany went all the way with her representation of the age groups of students. Working with kids from ages five to sixteen I know what they will say, how they will act, and generally what kind of questions they will ask. And Brittany hit the nail on the head with her “act.” Makes me a bit paranoid of what she’ll try when I have to present but I’m sure it will be interesting to say the least.

            Planning the actual lesson took me about five hours, most of it reading my old notes, and trying to make history interesting, not an easy feat. I’m still not sure whether it’s good enough for Monday. Trying to incorporate many of the different things that we’re gone over in class has been difficult. History has typically and for some good reasons been a mostly lecture style class. It’s hard to come up with more discussion based teaching since the topic I’m teaching requires some knowledge of prior lessons and events most of which the “students” I’ll be teaching won’t know. Because of this it might kill the discussion based idea, at least the main part of it, but I was able to come up with something that would include some discussion so it’s not a boring lecture. Plus the lesson will only be thirty minutes max which kills my in class project idea. Since all the projects require knowledge from the lesson which takes up most of my time and I won’t have time to do the project. So my lesson is just a little too short to meet the minimum requirement and too long to have an in class project. This dilemma had me doing a couple hours of research for creative ideas to fill the gap and make the class more interesting. I believe I found it after about two hours of searching, I think it might just work. What is it exactly? Well I can’t say right now for obvious reasons of course. But I’m glad that we got to observe the high school a few weeks ago. I took some of what I saw in that class and implemented it into my own lesson; I’ll talk a little bit more about it on Wednesday. But I did learn something from this that is time management. It took five hours to create my lesson and to verify my info plus research to add some more interesting aspects of the lesson. When I finally get out of here and start teaching for real I’m gonna have to take into account how long it takes to make a lesson, grade papers and tests and all that, and deal with the school and angry parents. I also need to create a flexible enough lesson plan to take into account setbacks and allow for student interaction. But I am glad I’m learning it here and now instead of later and when I’m out there teaching for real.