Lesson Strengths
In case I have not yet made this apparent, I am incredibly enthusiastic about this particular topic and I think that was a real strength in my lesson. Because I found the topic so interesting and really felt a need to explore this topic, I really think it helped the structure and information given in my lesson. Because of my interest in the subject I did a great deal of research on the topic, and was able to come to the lesson informed and ready. At the same time, I feel like I kept a good balance of using learning activities for my fellow students to learn on their own, without over-saturating them with information they might not find as interesting as I do. I also think I was able to showcase some really amazing resources (which I will link below, just because I'm so excited to share them!) which allowed my classmates to get excited about the topic as well!
I think my other strength in this lesson, which ties in well with my enthusiasm strength, is my preparedness. I was really happy with my lesson plan going into the lesson. I think my learning objectives were very clear and I think my activities tied in really well with these LOs. I was pleasantly surprised by my flexibility throughout the lesson. Due to time constraints I was able to switch around my lesson plan a little and cut out an activity and I think I did it rather smoothly.
Lesson Revisions
If I ever had to teach this lesson again, I think I would restructure my first activity. The first activity was to discuss with your table group some ideas to get your class out into the community or bring the community into the classroom. Then students were to create a word web including these different ideas. In theory this may be an alright idea, but in practice it wasn't essential to the lesson as students weren't exactly sure what 'community involvement' meant at this point. Instead I might do a group discussion on the different aspects of community involvement. This would allow the students to participate but would also allow me to prompt the whole group towards other ideas such as being aware of mental and physical health resources (clinics, counselors, etc), academic assistance to perhaps broaden the responses a little.
In general, I think I really need to work on attention grabbers and classroom management. I've seen so many examples of attention grabbers in the past weeks, and yet I find myself feeling really uncomfortable when I have to 'perform' them. In future, I will really try to work on using my 'teacher voice' and also using various attention grabbers.
Here's a link to my Pinterest board where I've included the links to all the resources I used for my lesson:
http://www.pinterest.com/jowirz/microteach-lesson/
Revision - Microteach Lesson Plan - KSA #13 Community Involvement |
Web Resource - Record Page - Community Involvement |
KSA #13 Community Involvement - Word Web |