When it comes to teaching I am not
spontaneous. I like to be meticulously planned and know exactly what I’m going
to say and do. With that being said, I don’t like surprise lessons. When I
taught my first mini lesson in my cooperating teacher’s classroom I was so nervous. I knew we
were going to start taking over some of the small teaching responsibilities
that my teacher does, but she hadn't told us about the specifics of the lessons
we were going to have to teach. When we arrived on a Tuesday morning, my teacher
had laid out the lessons we were supposed to teach in a few hours. Of course I
start to freak out because, like I said earlier, I don’t like to teach if I’m
not prepared. We had some time to prep for the lesson, and as I looked over it,
the content that I was teaching was not as hard as I was making it out to be.
As my peer taught, I observed her and saw how comfortable she was with teaching
her part of the lesson, and knew that my part of the lesson would also go
smoothly. I reviewed the material, knew what content I was teaching and what I
wanted the students to come away with.
One
thing I noticed while teaching was that sometimes you go into a lesson knowing
everything you want to say, what you want to get across, and how you’re going
to do that, but it ends up changing half way through the lesson when you see
what the students understand and what they are struggling with. When I was
planning the lesson I hadn't thought about students responses and them backing
up their answer with text evidence, but as I went through the lesson that
popped into my mind to have them practice the skill of supporting their answer,
a skill that is so valuable nowadays for students.
As
a teacher I will have to be flexible. Most of the lessons that I teach, will be
planned explicitly, but sometimes lessons will come up that I haven’t planned
for, and I will just have to go with the flow. Also sometimes students will be so into a lesson that they won't want to stop. I will have to adjust an know when to end a lesson and know when to allow my students to continue working. Teaching is all about
flexibility.
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