Taking Teaching to the Next Level!

The experience of the Social Studies Methods Fieldwork and Science Methods Fieldwork combined is great.  Getting experience teaching in front of an entire class before student teaching is one of the best experiences I can get.  Not only is teaching and managing an entire class, in this case fifth graders, helpful but we are also learning how to work with other colleagues.  Teaching fifth grade Social Studies was a wonderful learning experience and as I go to fieldwork every Tuesday and Thursday, I wish that I was teaching them still! These fifth graders were a great class to have a field experience with and they taught me a lot!

This experience gives us the experience of co - teaching, creating lesson plans, and preparing for these lessons which is not always the easiest task because so much effort goes into everything.  In order to be very successful, you have to be very organized and comfortable with the lesson you are teaching.   The lesson planning and actual teaching helps us to learn how to work together as professionals to ensure that the students get the best learning experience possible.  As my group and I worked together, we kept in mind each other's opinions and ideas. Working in groups, in this case, actually gives us an advantage because we get to put four heads together to plan out this experience for the fifth graders.  Using everyone's individual ideas and putting them together is a recipe for fantastic lessons.  This semester, we had to plan three lessons: direct instruction, inquiry and cooperative learning.  Cooperative learning was new to everyone in my group so, we really worked hard together to ensure that we planned a great lesson (and we did!) Working collaboratively as we do for this course is good because we need to know how to effectively work together.  This is going to be a part of our jobs as teachers.  We are going to be apart of teams and committees in our schools while working with other professionals. This experience really gets you ready for that to happen!

Lesson planning is a very tedious process.  Everyone in the group has to sit down together to clearly plan out and organize everything you are going to teach and how you are going to do it.  This experience is not a good one if everyone does their work independently and does not work together to be on the same page.  If you work together throughout this whole process, then it will really give you a great lesson planning experience.  There are many things that factor in to planning a lesson, such as, materials, the behaviors/needs of the students, and the entire classroom in general (seating, space, etc). This affects how we plan because a certain part of your lesson may not be effective because you may not have access to certain materials, the layout/space of the classroom will effect activities you may want to do, the cooperation of the students throughout your lesson, etc.  We especially run into these obstacles when we are planning inquiry and cooperative learning lesson because the students would be working together in groups during cooperative and in inquiry, the students would be using the iPads and having discussions.  Based off of the materials we had, we knew that we would have four groups, then we thought how would we group these students so that everyone is learning and not just talking to their neighbor or distracting others, we also had to think about rules that we would have to put in place when the students were using the iPads because they could easily go off track. During lesson planning, we are mainly focusing on the students and if what we are doing is going to give them a great learning experience.  This is also why Dr. Smirnova as us reflect at the end of our lesson plans.  We ask ourselves questions like will they be able to read the text on the slides? Was the use of a particular activity or question an effective way to pre-assess the students? Is the guided practice activity an effective way to go over what the students learned? Does the independent practice allow the students to really sum up the lesson for the day? As teachers the student is our number one priority.  We are constantly thinking if out lessons are clear, engaging, and effective.

Each lesson we taught the students scaffolded what the students would be dong in the next lesson. Everything the students learned in the direct would help them as they investigated in inquiry and created in cooperative learning.  For the first lesson we are providing the information the students need in order for them to be responsible for their learning in the next two lessons.

Since most of my group and I had the experience of teaching a whole class from last semester, we kept in mind the practicality of lessons.  We remembered what works for the students to get the maximum learning experience and what doesn't work.  It is okay for lessons to not always go how you planned because every single student is different.  There is no way a teacher can plan a lesson one way that will perfectly mold to every student.  We just have to learn from those mistakes and reflect on what will work better next time.  These types of experience are what help us to become better teachers.  We learn how to plan lessons to accommodate to the needs of all of our students, to make sure that we communicate our material clearly, to ensure that all of the students are actively engaged, and so much more!

Also, from last semester's experience, we remembered that we needed to make sure our classroom management system was being used.  Last semester taught me that a lot is happening during lessons, but you still need to use your system so that the students are under control.  This semester, my group and I made sure throughout all three lessons that we kept up on our system.  When we awarded the students stars, the students would continue to exhibit the behavior that we expected from them.  Although, if the students were getting to loud, we would award the teachers a point which upset the students.  This made them quiet back down and refocus which is what we want to happen!  At the end, we were very happy to give the students their prize for winning the students vs. teachers game!

Going through this experience for a second time made me so much more confident in my ability to implement a lesson to a whole class. I learned even more about organization, about double checking everything to ensure the lesson will run smoothly and the students can work independently, making sure all the directions for activities and work are clear for the students to understand and that you know exactly how you want a lesson to work, and giving the students a clear rundown of what is going to happen for that lesson so that there are no surprises at the end (like independent practice without using their note sheet!) The students feed off of us as the teachers so, it is always important to stay positive and engaged in what you are teaching them so that they are engaged and ready to learn about it!

The experience I had with the fifth graders confirmed for me that I want to be a teacher.  It was so much fun teaching these students, and I cannot wait to have my own class someday where I get to teach them so much more!