Microteaching I Reflection

After I sat back down from teaching my lesson to my group, I immediately second-guessed everything that I had done, from talking way too much to wishing that I had worn a better pair of shoes. It was a frustrating experience to have realized that I had devoted so much time and effort into crafting something that ended up not meeting the high standards I set for myself. I slept on it, still feeling incredibly let down in myself, and awoke the next morning recognizing that, hey, this was my first time out. Mistakes were bound to happen. The important thing was to learn from those mistakes so that I would be better off the next time. And as pessimistic as I had been earlier, I also realized that there were a handful of positives to extract from the experience.

The people in my group were extremely supportive, offering me both praise and friendly criticism after I sat down, and were extremely attentive and non-disruptive while I was teaching. I had drafted a set of objectives to be met, and although it appeared that I had conveyed these to my "students," the structural problems of my lesson- not having an in-class practice assignment for them to demonstrate their comprehension of these objectives- meant that I don't have any quantifiable evidence as to how effective my lesson really was. I felt that I was relatively confident while teaching, and I thought that my timing of when and how to introduce new information was actually quite good. I felt like I was effectively emphasizing the parts of the lesson that needed it. Although the overall timing of my lesson was not up to par- I believe it fell a minute short of its intended target- it was nice to see that I was comfortable while I was up there, and that I didn't feel utterly boring. I also thought how I introduced the lesson was creative and effective.

I'm sure that I would not have felt this way had I seen things not go nearly as smoothly with actual middle school-high school students in place of my fellow classmates. I definitely talked wayyyyy too much, something that Dr. Kraus had addressed before I implemented it and that I did not effectively address in my edits. In a college lecture hall, that is fine, but trying to talk through the whole lesson is definitely not going to keep young teens interested in what I'm trying to teach. In retrospect, I would definitely produce an in class assignment asking students to analyze the primary documents I passed out via a series of written questions after I had introduced the lesson to the class. I would go through the powerpoint concurrently in-between analysis of each document rather than try to cram it in all at once; I felt bored teaching the material that way, so I could only imagine how bored my classmates must have been. I would also try not to spoon feed what I was trying to illustrate while teaching my lesson, and would further encourage students to ask questions rather than drone on myself. This would allow students to actually demonstrate their grasp of the material rather than leaving me clueless as to how effective I really was, which was how I felt after teaching my lesson.

This was definitely not my best work, which I guess can be expected under the circumstances- my first time constructing a lesson plan and implementing it. There is definitely a lot of room for improvement and, as much as I feel that I did so many things wrong, I feel like I learned so much more about what I can do to make things better. Who knew studying to educate others had so many learning curves.