Week #4 Video, Reflection

Reflection on Week #4 Video

When I knew that this week consisted of working a lesson that maximized instructional time, I was both glad and terrified. I was glad because I am pretty dang good at talking. In fact, I excel at lecture style teaching, and sometimes, I find it hard to break the mold on that kind of instruction. I have been working on flipping the classroom and having the students fill in the blanks on what we are doing in class that particular day, but it requires a lot of preparation on my part to plan for a teaching style that is still semi-unfamiliar to me. That being said, I am working on giving the students more responsibility, but I also love lecture style classes because they are so simple for me to plan. I was terrified because I was worried that my students’ roles wouldn’t be well represented if I was the one “maximizing instructional time”, but I have some pretty opinionated and intelligent young ladies. I think that today was a regular day in my classroom: I taught with the big items and had them fill in the details as best they could with no prior reading. It was a “cold” class.

After watching the video(s), I realized that I really like how I have kind of tried to adopt a vague daily objective. I have been trying over the past few weeks of the clinical to become aware of the fact that a short outline of the class, either verbally or by the topics on the board, really erases any and all confusion of what is going to be achieved that day. When the students know what the goal is for the day, they tend to be invested in what we are covering, and they understand the purpose of the lesson. I think for this week’s concentration, I was quite happy with how well I did bringing the students back to the conversation when it started to stray a little bit. I also think that they truly understand their role of being the ones in charge of volunteering answers and information when asked. They have completely adopted an “it’s alright to be wrong as long as an educated guess is made” approach to the class, and I very much appreciate that. They understand their role as those being educated and are eager to input their knowledge by answering questions and participating in discussions or to further their knowledge by asking questions.

After watching the video(s), I realized that I don’t always involve the students. Sometimes I feel like I am just talking AT the students with little participation or engagement on their part. They might answer questions when prompted or when I engage them in discussion, but rarely do they initiate the questioning or the discussion. I don’t really know how I feel about that. I would like them to feel the ability to speak their minds freely about a topic that surrounds the day’s materials, but at the same time, brings a new spin on the subject being discussed. I haven’t found a way to get them to perform at that level, or at least, at a level that isn’t completely off topic. They have plenty of questions that they ask unwarranted, but they might not be appropriate to the day’s material, or they are interesting but so far off base. Where can I push them to be single minded but not to the point of inappropriateness? Currently, they are interested in the material because I try to make it relevant to their circumstance, but how can I get them to put together the material and its modern day relevance by themselves?