Sunday, September 7, 2008

Teaching Improvements

After watching a video from a lesson that I taught, I found that I had a lot of improvements to make. First off, it is crucial to speak loud. I could barely hear myself in the video, and in order to be an effective teacher the class must be able to hear you clearly. Also, I failed to introduce myself to the class before I started teaching. Students should feel comfortable with you as their teacher and if you do not tell them you name it is difficult for them to respect and trust you. When you are introducing a lesson you should always tell the students about the safety rules, so that you have a space that is fun, safe and full of learning for the students. When I was doing my lesson I did not tell the safety rules till after the lesson was over. This is bad because learning the rules after the lesson is pointless knowledge to them and a child could have been hurt.
I also realized that I did not entail a lot of the teaching skills and criteria into my lesson. I left out cues, challenges, pinpointing, feedback, and checking for understanding. Cues are very important when teaching young children a new skill. Cues help students learn and remember information better, and in my lesson I did not leave these students with a cue to remember. I also did not give the class a challenge that would have got them very excited about the class and the lesson. Also, when the students were partnered up and working on bumping I should have been going around to every group and giving them feedback of the good skills they had and areas that they needed to work on. At the end of the lesson we talked about the safety tips but failed to question the class for understanding of bumping. Many kids are not willing to raise their hand when they don’t understand something because they do not want to be embarrassed in front of their peers. Therefore, it is important to ask simple questions to the group to make sure they understood what to do and remember the proper techniques.
This lesson was a great introduction of how to be a better teacher. I now know what I am good at and what I need to improve on. I mostly have a lot of improving to do, but I am very willing to work hard to be the best teacher that I can be.

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