Keep calm and pretend its on the lesson plan

Monday, October 7

Today was our first lesson at Bishop Dunn! Overall, the lessons went fairly well. During our first lesson though, we had every possible technical difficulty that could happen, happen. It was very frustrating, but we made it work.

I think that our group presented well, given the circumstances. We were all a little thrown off by our technology not working properly, but we tried to keep a positive attitude and work through it. Now we know to always have a back up plan in case the Internet goes down or we can't use a piece of technology. 

Our direct instruction lesson was based off of a Prezi presentation. Each of my fellow teachers and myself taught a various slides pertaining to the topic of New York and the New Nation.

Looking back on our video of our teaching, there are a lot of things I personally need to work on. One thing that I noticed is that I was constantly playing with my name tag, fixing my shirt, and touching my hair. Though I did not realize that I was doing those things, they look very unprofessional. Another thing that I need to work on is to not say the word guys. There are plenty of other words I can use instead. For example, I can say boys and girls, or class to get the students attention. I have been trying to eliminate the word guys from my vocabulary altogether, that way I will never use it.

Wednesday, October 9

 Today was a day used to reflect on our first lesson in class. The two other groups shared their feedback from our first lesson, commenting on our lessons and how they were implemented. Overall, the class had mostly positive things to say about our lesson, only commenting on a few things like projecting our voices and using formal language. One big comment that was made by Dr. Smirnova was to make bridges between our lesson sections and our slides. At some points, our lesson went from one topic to a completely different one without any connection whatsoever. When we created the lesson, we did not even think of that aspect. I am really glad that we get to have Wednesdays in class to reflect on our previous lessons. This will allow us to succeed in our future lessons and figure out where we can make improvements.

I really enjoyed our first day of fieldwork. I like that Dr. Smirnova wants us to video tape our lessons. This gives us much needed practice for the EDTPA that has recently been added to achieve teaching certification in NY state. I think that this is great practice for that final video, allowing us to get used to being videotaped. I thought that I would be very nervous around it, but I did not even notice the camera at all. From the video, I noticed that I play with my name tag, and my shirt a lot. I never noticed that I did this before watching our video. I also seem to sway back and forth while I'm listening to my fellow teachers teach and I tend to use informal language like gonna, wanna, and guys often. Little habits like this are things that I need to work on to become the best teacher I can be.

Friday, October 11

 Today was our second lesson at Bishop Dunn. My fellow teachers and I taught our inquiry lesson based on artifact bags. We began our lesson with a Google Presentation with a review of the vocabulary from our previous lesson. We were able to show a picture of our tagxedo that we were not able to show on Monday. Next, we wanted to review the inquiry process and connect the artifact bag activity to historians and the scientific method.

Once the students were able to name the steps, we provided a slide for helpful hints when investigating through the artifact bags. While I read through the helpful hints, my fellow teachers modeled how to go through the scientific process using an artifact bag about oceans.

Overall, I think that our lessons this week went well. One thing piece of advise that I need to remember is to go with the flow, or simply pretend that it's on the lesson plan. You can not prepare for every possible event or error to occur. Sometimes you need to just work with what you have or what your students provide you with. Another big thing is to keep calm! Even if every little thing goes wrong in your lesson, if you stay calm and keep moving forward, the students may not even notice that it did not go according to plan.