School Teaching 1 Reflection

Overall, I felt that our teaching was quite positive and successful. In fact, to be honest, I was somewhat surprised at how well it went. While I have had some experience teaching middle school students, I have had essentially no experience with elementary-aged children; I really knew not what to expect, despite having observed this class (though three different rotations of students) for the past three weeks. The students responded quite well, even enthusiastically, when we asked for volunteers, for example. They seemed to understand our visuals, although I am not sure that the words for the songs were all that legible. The students truly appeared to understand the concept of the fermata by the time we were done.

To name a few of my strengths, I gave very clear “conducting” instructions as we sang the songs with fermatas in them. Also, I took note when some added fermatas in their singing that was not on the board, and I commented to correct this right away. Additionally, I must be honest, I really liked my use of Happy Birthday to demonstrate a common application for the fermata. The students seemed to respond well to this and understand how the fermata relates to Happy Birthday.

However, there are many areas in which I could improve. For one, I speak quickly. This is common knowledge to my friends, among others; when speaking publicly I try to remember to speak such that it sounds to me like I am speaking way too slowly. In practice, though, I often forget to specifically remember to speak slowly, and my speech begins to get fast and even difficult to understand. Along these lines, I also occasionally mumble something that, in all honesty, I really do not intend for the students to hear; usually, I am just thinking out load, but I need to keep these thoughts to myself. Otherwise, I become less important, from the students’ perspectives, to listen to than one whose every word is important and carefully selected. Also, when singing with the students, I modeled fairly accurately, but in my own range. Since the students’ voices are roughly an octave above mine but have not completely developed their ears yet, I really should model in their octave, using my falsetto. I do not feel comfortable doing so in front of students yet, so this is obviously something I need to work on. The only other negative comment regarding my teaching relates to our planning, so I will save it for the next section.

I feel that, in general, we planned this lesson quite well. We started discussing ideas no less than two weeks prior to the teaching, finalizing all the but most final of plans the Friday before we taught. I then typed up the lesson plan, sharing it with John for approval and comments. We planned a little more than we ended up having time to teach, which is exactly what we were hoping for. However, I must say that there is one area in which we could have done much better. After teaching, it became clear to me that I taught significantly less material than John did and spent significantly less time in front of the students. This was definitely not intentional on my part – I usually over-volunteer myself for things. But it is the truth about what happened. I feel badly for this, not just because John got stuck with doing a lot more, but also simply because I “taught” this lesson to gain experience and practice, and then I didn’t even give myself the opportunity to actually gain a whole lot of the experience. In my mind, this is definitely the biggest area that I/we could have improved in.

If I were to teach this lesson again in the future, I would not really change anything as to the content or even skeleton plan for teaching it. However, I would simply divide the teaching responsibilities better, most fairly; also, hopefully, more experience will teach me a handful of practical ways to communicate better with the students.

During the planning and teaching process, the following INTASC standards were used, at least to a certain extent:
1. Knowledge of Subject Matter
2. Knowledge of Human Development and Learning
3. Multiple Instructional Strategies
5. Classroom Motivation and Management Skills
6. Communication Skills
7. Instructional Planning Skills
8. Assessment of Student Learning

[ home ]  [ philosophy ]  [ mused courses ]  [ pgp ]  [ intasc standards ]  [ links ]