Unloading the Trailer: Micro Teaching

My micro-teaching experience occurred November 14th-16th at Juniata Valley High School, under Mrs Rayleen Russell. Matt and Kayla were also along for the experience. I taught Mrs Russell's 3rd period of the day, which is an 8th grade rotational course (she sees every 8th grader in the school for 1/4, or one marking period). This was a situation that I did not expect to find myself in as a pre-service teacher, but I took on the challenge with an open mind. My topic:
Overall, I like the feeling I got from being in front of a class three days in a row. I enjoyed writing my lessons from MyCaert. I woke up each morning excited to teach. I will take the following away as this chapter of my #teachag journey comes quickly to an end.

Gems

• Kahoot: When I observed her class, she spent the day playing a kahoot game with them to review livestock breeds. I had heard of it before but had never used it. The students seemed to love it, so I decided to try it as a unique form of assessment. This definitely had their most undivided attention of any of my activities. One student actually said "you are a winner in my book" when I announced the activity. I need to tweak my overall management of the activity, but I believe I found a favorite tool for the teacher tool box. 
• Showing Learning: I feel I did a good job of actually showing growth in my 3 days there, via kahoot as described above. For the beginning pre-test (10 questions) the students ended with 43% correct answers. For the summitive test (15 questions, 10 repeat and 5 new), students ended with 65% correct answers. That may not seem like a lot, but most incorrect answers were centered around a few questions, which I will take as a fault on my part. Overall, I was able to show and archive growth with very little input on my part.
• Classroom Management: 8th graders are a handful. I had in my mind that I could not trust them farther than I could throw them (which being 8th graders is not too shabby). I made sure that they knew I was in charge, and they played to me well that way. I am a fan of the "proximity to the trouble student" strategy and it worked well at least three times. My strongest example was actually with a senior who spends the period as Mrs Russell's senior project. The students were working on group work, and he and I chatted briefly about the grade level. One student acted up and the senior took it upon himself to yell "hey sh*t brain" at the student. I acted quickly and sternly told him that that behavior is not tolerated when I am in the room. The behavior stopped, but I would be interested to see how that would have changed his attitude if I was there more days.

Ops

• Over Lecture/Share: Lecture is the best way to convey a lot of information in a short amount of time. That is what I tried to do, and my teaching became very lecture heavy. It is not necessary the fact that this is what I did, but I did it for up to 20 minutes at a time. A no-no for any age group. The thing is, my topic was so large that I had a hard time narrowing down a focus area. I would like to do other activities, but I don't think I could have covered the same material. Think: learn a few things well, not cover a lot of things.
• Classroom Management: I spent too much time working with students on the ends of the behavior spectrum, that a few in the middle felt over looked
• Clarity of Instruction: I have a hard time articulating the thoughts in my head, which can cause my thoughts to get jumbled. Because of this, I learned I need to slow down and deliberately go through the 4 elements of instructions (signal, task, comprehension, signal).

Concerns

• Prep Time: I spent a lot of time prepping for each class. I hope it gets better. This worries me as I will be taking on a full load here in a few months.

Unloading the Trailer: Inquiry Based Instruction

In a previous blog, I mentioned how in my teacher toolbox, Inquiry Based Instruction (IBI) can be a power tool, but like most power tools they can be intimidating at first and even dangerous to an inexperienced user. This was my first time using IBI in it's true form. Here are my thought for my IBI lab on soil.

Gems:

• I was surprised how well my plan flowed in to it's self. My first part was having them observe and capture on a fishbone diagram, and the second part was test an observation. It seemed potentially far fetched but by the end of observation, groups were itching to test. That is exactly the type of interest in the subject I was hoping to foster. 
• Board writing. I like to organised by spreading things out, and all the board space allowed me to do that. I worry about my hand writing by it doesn't seem like it held the learning back.
• A few students were having a hard time grasping what I wanted them to do. I was able to clarify 1-on-1 very well.

Ops:

• Clarification. I have found that my mind operates in a random and scrambled fashion, and therefore my directions and instruction follows suit. I am seeing the value of having instructions directions and questions clearly and simply written out, so I can "read the script" when teaching and not talk scrambled.
• Relating to my comments above, instead of "spitting knowledge" at them whenever something cool or important comes up, I need to slow down more and make everything purposeful. Use a student scribe, talk slower, and by far make sure I give students time to capture down what they need to know