Decisions and Alternatives
Reflection on first video lesson
Before the kick off of my final semester, I decided that I would really try to focus on putting in to practice many of the tactics that I had been taught during my time at the University of Montana. One of the things that I learned is that it is important to get kids up and moving, so that they are not just sitting at their desks hopefully absorbing everything that you try to instill in them. I made the choice to start this lesson out in that way. As you will see I am having the class as a whole participate in an activity that takes little time, but will get there blood flowing, and their jitters out. I am hoping that it works to get them focused throughout the duration of this lesson.
I really enjoyed this part of the lesson. It gave me a chance to lighten the mood in the class, and have a little fun with them. After this lesson, there were several times were the class felt excited for when I had a chance to teach. I think that this part of the lesson went very well. I let the class know what I expected of them to both do and not do. After reviewing the lesson, I am glad that I did this exercise. You notice the boy near the front of a class needed to get a little more out than the rest of the class.
In this next clip, I am opening up the lesson and end up addressing one of my students directly, but somewhat indirectly. The lesson was on making decisions, and learning about alternatives, and how you can use this knowledge to begin to make better choices. This young boy decided that he was going to not pay attention, and instead wanted to cut out paper masks. I obviously did not plan on this, but it just so happened to work out that he became an example. The next student decided that he wanted to start squeaking his shoes on the floor during the lesson. It just so happened that he started making this noise during my talk on what alternative decisions are, and so I was able to ask him what alternatives are available to him.
This was the part of my lesson that I really liked. I thought that I did a good job with thinking on my feet. I had some class management issues that I needed to address, and instead of stopping my lesson and focusing on the distraction, I used the distraction as a part of my lesson to keep the class on task. The thing that you could not see is that by addressing these situations, I got other kids on task as well. A little collateral restoration.
For the next clip I am going to go into what is the hardest part to bear. It is the segment that divulges the worst part of this lesson. After going over this period of instruction with my supervisor and cooperating teacher, we discussed the amount of questions that I allowed during the entirety of the lesson. I later reviewed the tape and had to fast forward through most of it because of how much class discussion I had allowed. Having the class get involved in what is going on is great. There is a point where the class takes over, and the instructor needs to regulate how many responses are allowed in the discussion.
There are a few other things that I noticed that I need to do to better my appearance in the front of the room. You may have noticed that I tend to play with my wedding ring a little when I am nervous. You can see it a lot during the recording in a whole. You may be able to pick up on that in the clips that I have chosen for this portfolio. I was fortunate enough to allow myself the time to sit and watch this video before I taught my next lesson In order to change what I needed to fix, or at least work to change it.
What I need to change is to pace my lesson better. I decided to pick a number of responses that I will allow for the different segments of my lesson. I also noticed that I tend to call on the same group of students throughout my instruction. In order to fix this problem I decided to call on students by pulling sticks (There is a jar in the class that has Popsicle sticks with each kids name written on one end). This allows for a more random and objective ways of calling on students. It also requires for my class to try harder to pay attention, because they will never know when they will be called on. Overall I did not think that my lesson went to poorly. Many of my students were engaged, and I think that it gave me a load of confidence to get up and do it again later. Let's see if the next video lesson was an improvement.
