Tuesday, December 10, 2013

American Born Chinese -- Mini Reflection

Teaching a lesson to students is already difficult. Teaching a lesson to your peers and getting feedback is even worse. Or at least that how I always imagine it to be. I always have what turns out to be an irrational fear that someone is going to tell me, “maybe teaching just isn’t for you,” or, “maybe you should choose a different career path.” But this never happens.

Looking back now, I think getting feedback on your lesson is a great source for teacher candidates. It allows us to see what awesome things we are doing that we might not have been aware of, and what we could do to improve. For example, I did not think that I seemed very confident in front of the class. However, apparently I hide my nerves better than I give myself credit for, and appear more comfortable than I am. For some people, it’s easy to act confident, that is, until you start looking at the little nervous habits people have that they are unaware of. Usually, mine is fidgeting with some item of clothing, but that day it was keeping my hands in my pockets. By doing this, I was unintentionally closing myself off to students, limiting my interactions with them.


I think that, overall, I did a good job connecting each part of my lesson together, and had good transitions between them. There are definitely a fews things that I can improve, such as leaving definitions up, or making sure the information on pictures I give students actually match up. When I printed up the pictures for them to discuss had the text printed on the wrong pages with ridiculous amounts of hyperlinks. This is something that I should always double check before handing out information to my students because it will become very difficult to understand for them. I'm really glad that we do our lessons in class this way, because it really does give us a safe environment to practice and improve our teaching.

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