Saturday, March 12, 2011
Getting Ready to Grow Up
Yesterday was really an eye awakening experience for me. For starters, I presented my first math lesson to a class of twelve students I would say pretty successfully and then I went to tour my SYOSP school for next year. Teaching the lesson was really difficult because I haven't been able to observe one of their math classes yet this year so we were not sure how much they knew and what they were able to learn from our lesson. According to our observations, we were told that our lesson was completed successfully but there were some changes to be made for the future. Hearing this really made me ecstatic because we were not very sure how it had gone with the students. I think one reason we felt this way is because we really did not have an assessment method of what the students had learned during our time teaching them and I believe that if we would have assessed their knowledge we would have been more confident about our teaching strategies in the end. I was scared standing in front of the students trying to explain what fractions meant and giving them instructions for the lesson. I feel like most of the students understand the point we were making for our lesson, but there were some slower learning students who needed some more guidance during the lesson. This made me really think how hard it is to be a teacher, needing to be aware of all of the student's understanding at all times to make sure they are all on the same page as you are. I am excited for my future lessons, and I believe that yesterday's lesson really helped me get my first time jitters out, while I'm sure there's plenty more to come! Yesterday was also the first time that I went to go visit my future SYOSP school, Alpha Hart Lewis Elementary School. The school is beautiful and planned out so well and being there really made me excited to start my student teaching for the fall. I learned a lot about the school and what it will mean to me while I'm there for an entire year. I am anxious and excited for my future at Alpha Hart Elementary School!
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Hurray for a successful lesson taught!
ReplyDeleteYou mentioned you didn't have an assessment, but I wonder if you sort of did, or how else would you know who did and didn't understand? There are end-of-lesson assessments, and there are formative assessments which I consider to be the questioning and observations we do during a lesson to guide our instruction of the lesson. I may be thinking too simple here, but when I ask, "Does that make sense to you?" I'm checking for understanding, and to me, that's assessing.