Thursday, September 15, 2016

Unloading the trailer: Lab 2, First Day of School

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In racing, you anticipate Saturday night (race day) more than any other day of the week. That is the day you get to show the world the results of your long hours of preparation in the shop. You may win, or you may crash. Either way you take the results, notes, and seat time back to the shop to make the car better for next week. And so it is with AEE412 lab. Everything else we do is to hone our teaching craft, and on Wednesday we get to show it off. I am pleased with the benchmark I set this week. Here are my takeaways as I head back to the shop:


Gems: My peers came at me full force with their assigned roles. I believe I handled their questions and attitudes with grace and without letting it throw me off. For example, Michael noted that he was impressed with how I handled him walking in late and being rude. I feel good because this moment felt the most natural to me. There were other questions that threw me, but it gave me confidence in my ability to think on my feat. With more prior preparation, I feel I can really rock this out in the future. I believe that I was able to command the room while still making students feel comfortable, and that I had a good representation of what the first 10 minutes of the first day of school would look like

Ops: I came into this lab with the belief that it was most important for me to have as much direct instructional time as possible. With that, when it came time to do an activity I broke character and explained what I would do now instead of actually doing it. I had my peers get out of their seats for bingo only so I could demonstrate how I would re-focus the class after the activity. Going off of that timing note, I should not have transitioned from syllabus to procedures so quickly. In doing all of this I lost the ability to gauge the timing of my lesson. I see now that I should come to lab prepared with all components, that way I can gauge how long activities will take. This is meant to be real teaching, not a simulation of real teaching!

2 comments:

  1. I treated the lab as a simulation as well which I wont do next time. It is sort of hard not to treat it as a simulation but making it as real as possible by being completely compared with materials and all.

    I truly thought you managed the class extremely well, youre a natural man!

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  2. Thanks Nathan for sharing.

    Work to incorporate Peer Feedback into your future lab blog posts.

    Good job of organizing by Gems and Opps.

    ReplyDelete