KA 7

Teaching in the classroom has been a fantastic experience. Not only have I learned from a hands-on experience but I also learned from my classmates. This experience made me feel like a real teacher from lesson plans to hands on teaching students. Working together with other teacher candidates was also a great experience that I will use in the future. This experience has taught me how to actively use  strategies of teaching such as direct, inquiry and cooperative teaching by creating these types of lessons and teaching them to the class. Being able to see how students reacted to my lessons was also a great learning experience.

After giving the students a pre-test we learned that they did not know much about minerals. This taught us to teach the students more about minerals. Students learn differently so we designed our lesson plans to help every type of learner understand the material. On the first day, we taught directly from the smart board for the more traditional learner. We spoke loud and clearly for students who learn from listening to information. We provided hand-outs for the students who learn better from reading or in case they did not hear everything we said. We also had the students go through the different steps of inquiry when we asked them questions before, during and after the streak, luster, and hardness tests on the minerals for the more hands-on learners.

By having the students write a letter to Ms.Mineral we assessed them on what they learned from our first lesson. This taught us that most of the students understood the tests they performed during class. For the next lesson, we went more in depth on different minerals. We spilt the students into groups of three or four and each teacher candidate went to a group.

Teaching in a group has many advantages. By having each teacher candidate have their own group we saw what each student knows and what they need to work on. We had the students make their posters as a group on certain minerals to further their knowledge. The groups shared different information about their mineral posters to teach the whole class.

            Being part of the first group was very scary. We did not know what to expect or how the students would react to what we were teaching. My group worked hard together. We learned from our first time teaching to be more organized and share the floor with each teacher candidate. Watching my peers teach their lessons also was a great learning experience. I would have never thought that I could model the rock cycle out of crayons like Group 3 did! I learned from Group 2 a nice trick to stay organized is to use Popsicle sticks to call students to share to save time and keep the lesson flowing. I learned from Group 4 how to move on from tough situations when a student made an inappropriate statement but they moved on nicely and continued to teach. Overall throughout my college career I would say that this was the most helpful experience so far. It was very hands on and I learned so much in such a short period of time. 

             This experience also taught me how to write different lesson plans. Going through the steps of inquiry in a science class is very important. The design for my group's lesson plan was to do a more of a hands-on technique. We learned that we were not supposed to do our inquiry and direct lessons together. For the direct lesson we taught the students off of the smart board about minerals. We mostly focused on using the steps of inquiry by having the students perform tests on the different minerals.

My group provided our students with a scientific method chart to show the students the different steps of inquiry.

             After seeing my classmates' lessons and how they designed their lesson plans I know for next semester how to do my lesson plans the correct way. This experience also allowed me to work with different types of students. For example, there were many behavior problems in that classroom. I learned how to handle them and try to keep them on track by saying they would get a "color change" if they did not do what was asked of them. Overall I learned how to work with other teachers to get the job done!