Microteaching II Reflection

I have a terrible habit of being extremely hard on myself. My girlfriend and friends can attest to this; anytime I have a major assignment or exam that I hand in, I fret over every minute detail, everything that I felt I had done wrong or could have been improved. More often than not- and much to the amusement of my significant other- the worrying was unwarranted and I meet the high expectations that I set for myself. This microteaching session was no exception, but as I reviewed the video of my lesson later that night (after a couple of hours of self-criticism),  I felt a lot more confident in the lesson I presented to the class. It was definitely much more successful than my first one, and I feel like this one will be a nice starting point to base future lessons off of.

I definitely liked how I incorporated videos right at the beginning of my lesson. I had seen Mr. Lefort do this in his own classes, and I appreciated how it got kids immediately engaged in whatever the assignment was. This is the age of technology; capturing student interest in a medium that they can relate to is essential to effective pedagogy, and what better way of relating to kids than showing them videos on youtube? I liked how confident I both appeared in the video and felt up there afterwards, first addressing the class about what we would be working on today, and then presenting the videos and the actual assignment afterwards. My "students" were really awesome, and although there was initially silence after I allowed them to look at all the primary sources, they really grew into the assignment after I encouraged them to talk amongst themselves. There was some laughing, conversations were directly related to the assignment, and everybody really seemed to be enjoying what they were doing, which really made me…confident, in both myself and what I was doing.

I would have definitely liked to have structured the discussion following the exploration of the primary sources I made available. It was still productive and lead into neat conclusion of the lesson, but I wish it could have gone on longer so I could have pushed my students to make more connections and push some of the answers they were providing me with even further, as well as generating some more discussion among them rather than me being the sole catalyst of the discussion. Dr. Kraus had advised me to jot down further questions to push the discussion and I had attempted to follow his advice, but I clearly was not as thorough as I should have been. Nonetheless, I overall feel a lot more confident in this lesson overall, and I really enjoyed implementing it. I am excited now more than ever for what the future holds for me as I continue down the path of becoming an educator.