Lesson #1 of Orienteering

When the day arrived that I had to teach for my C-lab on Orienteering, I ended up coming down with a cold. This cold caused me to lose some of my voice, so I had difficulty speaking loudly. However, I worked with what I had, and tried to speak as loud as I could. I asked the class to listen carefully to me because I would be hard to hear. The lesson for the most part ran smoothly. I had all the students point to the North, South, East, and West. The second task delt with them working in a group and going to certain directions and performing exercises that were on the cards at that location. The hardest part for this lab was giving feedback. When it came time to giving someone feedback my mind would go blank on their name and I would have difficulty coming up with their name fast enough to give them feedback before they ran off to the next station. Also I found it hard to give feedback on the directions people were going. After teaching this lab I now know areas that I need to work on. One would be giving positive congruent feedback, another is working on my projection, and dealing with on the spot situations (losing your voice).

Feedback

Feedback is very important for students to hear from their teachers. Feedback allows them to understand areas they need to improve on and areas that they are being successful at. It is important with feedback that you make it go along with the cues that are taught and that you are positive with what you say.
After listening to my transcript, I gave feedback to five students. Two were boys and three were girls. I found that I am pretty even with feedback between the sexes but I usually just give feedback to the same individuals over and over again. Before I listened to my transcript I figured that my feedback was just going to be general, however I was surprised to find out that they were not all general. I was specific and postive with skills that students were performing. It was weird listening to my transcript becuase there was many breaks inbetween each feedback because I was walking around to each group. I liked listening to my transcript for my feedback because it made it very clear to me what I need to fix and how encouraging feedback should be.

Is that MY voice?

Transcripts are a great way to help students learn how to teach. Listening to their voices allows them to know if they need to have a more energenic voice or speak up louder.
For me, I feel that I spoke clearly so everyone could hear me but, I also feel I could have been more enthusiastic about my lesson. After listening to my transcript, I now know what I need to fix, but I was very happy that I did not say "um's" and 'uh's" a lot. Areas that I need to improve on are using more descriptive words when explaining a task and getting more involved in the game. I was just walking around to each group a lot and not being energetic and encouraging to the teams. I would just say a few feedback comments here and there (however, feedback is for another blog in the future).
After I was done instructing the lesson I was very annoyed with myself becuase I forgot to add an important challenge to my lesson. I really wanted to have individual scoring within the group so that there was some competition and more involvement in the activity.
For the most part, I was satisfied with how I taught and I really enjoyed listening to myself on the transcript because now I know how to improve.

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.