My First Solo Act

Micro Teaching was an interesting experience for me; my first time flying solo and actually teaching high school students by myself. I have taught students before, but when you are teaching Pre-Kindergarten it tends to be a little easier because you get to play games and do arts and crafts all day…and let’s not forget about nap time! I was pretty nervous walking into the class for the first time and was not sure what I was getting into when I saw the student who came into the classroom crawling on all fours barking like a dog! (I am not even lying that really happened!!)

The first day went well, I could tell that all the students knew I was nervous but towards the end of the class things started to go great. The further I got through my lecture of forestry the more comfortable I became. The first day I learned that when I develop note handouts that I should not put as much information on there, this will make the students pay attention more and they will have to listen to find out the information to write down. I reversed that concept and thought that the more I gave them the more they would pay attention because it was less work for them. Lesson learned!

The next day I walked back in and found out that we had a shortened period. We were going to be making paper, I had to figure out how to adapt quickly. This was a great real life teaching experience because teachers are thrown curve balls all the time.  I think that if I stuck to my original plan things would have went a lot smoother. Since we were going to be making paper out of paper and I thought it was going to take too long, I found myself making the lesson too adapted so there was not much for the students to do, there were a lot of students that were just not engaged. I also learned after hearing my feedback that I should incorporate a worksheet of some kind for the students to do, while they are working in lab stations this will help keep everyone engaged and the flow of the groups running easy.

The last day was our assessment day. I decided to give a quick quiz and had them fill out teacher feedback. After they completed both of those sheets, we had a discussion about careers in forestry and Penn State. I really enjoyed reading the feedback from all the students, they had great suggestions and said that they really learned a lot from me. I was happy with what they said but I knew myself that I have a lot to work on before student teaching. I really need to work on my time management for lessons, I finished one day early….not good! I also need to work on some of my questioning skills and direction giving needs to be clearer. Finally, and I think that this is the biggest, I need to be assertive and show the students that I am in charge when I walk into the classroom, regardless if it is not my class that I am teaching.

All in all I think it was a good eye opening experience for me, I know I have a lot to work on between now and student teaching. I will make sure I revamp some of my strategies and skills for when I conduct my Life Knowledge lesson with my students at Northern Burlington next week.