Observations worth their weight in gold

Usually I reference my notebook for the past weeks happenings but this week was so busy that I didn’t make the time to reflect once. I need to ensure that no matter how busy I will be getting in the last few weeks of School Experience and during my long practicum that I make the time to stop and reflect on what is happening and my reactions to my classes. The requirements of the week were to teach three or four consecutive lessons to build experience in teaching a linked idea. The mentor I was with for the week was the math and PE teacher and we were able to arrange for me to teach three lessons in math, focussing on multiplication and introducing the formal algorithm. I was able to teach each of my three lessons three times and thus was able to recognize what was working and what was not and adjust.

            I was somewhat anxious for the planning of this week to begin as my teaching philosophy is quite different from the mentor I would be working under. I wanted to be able to implement technology such as the document camera and use manipulatives in introducing new topics, two things that this particular teacher does not use. I was pleasantly surprised that they were more than happy to let me try things out and gave me a lot of help in designing my lessons to be effective. The lessons themselves went over really well.

My first lesson was a continuation of the teacher’s previous lesson therefore I was able to focus on setting up my classroom management and establish my authority. My second lesson was on Halloween. I predicted that the students would be hyper and unfocused so I made sure I used manipulatives so they had something new to focus on. This lesson went really well and was a great introduction to my third lesson which dealt with a lot of heavy topics. This third lesson was heavily procedural as my teacher mentor wanted the students to learn the formal algorithm for multiplication, a procedural task in itself. I voiced that I wanted the students to understand why we use the algorithm and how it works and had a way of introducing this. My TM loved the idea and showed me another way to start out the algorithm, giving my lesson a very powerful three step process. The lesson was extremely successful, easily my favourite lesson I have taught to date.

All observations from this week have been amazingly helpful. They have allowed me to really put program goal 5, working with feedback, to use. I was even able to get Andrew to sit in on one of my lessons and do an informal observation. This was great as he knows the specific methods we have learnt in classes and has an idea of what I am trying to accomplish. His feedback as well as the feedback from my Teacher mentor and Faculty mentor will be part of my focus in creating lesson plans for the coming week.