Reflection:
As part of my Teaching Learning and Assessment Module, I have been asked to do a reflection on my 20 Minutes teaching experience using one of the teaching reflective models. I have decided to use Gibbs Model of reflection (1988)
As part of this model I will be using the following headings:
Description – What Happened?
Feelings – What were you thinking and why?
Evaluation – What was good and bad about the experience?
Analysis – What sense can you make of the situation?
Conclusion – What else could you have done?
Action Plan – If it arose again what would you do?
On Monday 8th December 2014, I had my first experience as a teacher. It is not an experience I shall forget in a long time. From 5:00pm to 5:20pm I had to teach a class of 17 pupils of different ages and different abilities a topic on Networks and Hardware and Software.
Having spent best part of 3 whole days planning this 20 Minute session (Yes I know this seems excessive, but I learn a valuable lesson in preparing for this session), my turn finally arrived. I have always operated on the bases that it is better to be over prepared for an occasion then under.
Having prepared my class activities and put in envelopes and worksheets done, presentation prepared, thoughts and words of what I will be saying and when done, all this planning went out the window as 3:45pm struck as I’d realised I’d left all my work at home.
Fortunately I had emailed all the activities to my email so I had a backup so I was rushing around printing everything out and cutting the activities out which the students were going to do.
Learning to me is the passage of knowledge from one source to another. Teachers have a big role in the process of learning but ultimately it is more beneficial for students to be able to learn by themselves. Once the teacher has been able to teach the students the art of learning, this will then put the onus on the students to be able to extract information for themselves and be able to systematically process the knowledge in their own learning styles.
Student lead learning has greater success then teacher lead learning, this is mainly down to pupils learning in different ways, speeds etc (Rogers C, 2002).
Based on this theory, I planned my lesson so that the activities were mainly student lead. They had information sheets in front of them which they had to extract the information from and put these in to the appropriate order.
Differentiation is also very important part of teaching, one style fits all does not work as research shows students learn in different ways, speed etc (Tomlinson & Allan 2000). Therefore it is important to try to group together like minded students which will aide in lesson preparation. In planning for this lesson I had to think of a method which would help me do this. The best way is to convert the class in to three groups, red, yellow and green all having different objectives.
The way I was going to distinguish which student went in to the different groups was by doing an initial quiz.
Standing in front of the class to present my session brought some nerves, bit anxious as to how it would all turn out. After all I had only ever experience sitting behind a table looking at the teacher, and now I had all these pupils staring back at me.
As I began my presentation the sound to my presentation would not work, which did affect the attention grabbing effect which I had intended it to have but nevertheless I had to improvise.
I had brought in some small whiteboards which I had forgotten to hand out before the session started which added to the panic so I quickly handed out the boards for the students to put the answers on. Once settled I composed myself and began my presentation.
I started my session by doing a short initial multiple choice knowledge based questions to establish the current knowledge base of the class. The students were really impressed with the whiteboards and the way I started the PowerPoint presentation.
After asking the first question, I asked the pupils to put their answers on the whiteboard and hold them up. All those that got the incorrect answers received a red paper cut out. After the next question those students who got the question incorrect received the black paper and finally as the questions progressed those who were left received the green paper.
After doing the initial assessment I asked all those students who had the red paper to move to the same table, after which I informed them of their objectives. This was done the same with the other two groups. This was to enable me to differentiate between the students, which I believed worked really well.
The students were really enthusiastic and understood the task. However what I should have done was whilst I was explaining the task to one table I should have asked the other two groups to read through the activity sheet and discuss what they had to do, instead of saying I will come around to the individual tables to explain. The reason for this is because whilst I was explaining to one of the tables the other two tables were waiting around, this encouraged misbehaviour and the noise levels increased in the class.
As the lesson progress, students were really keen and where asking plenty of questions. Only other issue which I came across was that the work prepared for the red group was slightly too easy and I should have had a third task for them to do as they seemed to have grasped the concept and completed the work sooner than I had anticipated.
Upon feedback received from my tutor I could have got them to discuss about Networks may be note down in groups of 2 what types of Networks they knew and what they thought the advantages of them were this would have given them a task to be doing, as they became a bit loud as soon as they had completed the task.
I then concluded my session by doing a formative assessment (Black & Dylan 2001); this was done to check that students had met the objectives of the lesson. Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam state that by undertaking formative assessment aides in the development of a student more than a summative assessment.
I went back to my objectives and asked individuals questions to ascertain if they had successfully met the objectives. Other ways in which I could have assessed this is if I had more time It would have been in a form of a presentation where I would have got the students to come to the front of the class and present as a group what they had learnt and then I could have asked individuals questions to check that they had fully understood and met the objectives of the lesson.
All in all I believe my Micro teach went as well as I could have expected especially with me leaving the worksheets at home.
If I were to undertake this task again, I would make sure I put all my equipment and activities required for the lesson in my bag the night before. I would also come in to class early to test and make sure that the any electronic equipment which I would be using in class was working as expected.
If I had more time I would also have given constructive feedback on the activities which the students did. Due to the limited time which I had I was unable to do this. Hattie states that the effect size of providing constructive feedback is as much a whole grade increase (Hattie J, 2001)
I would also ensure that I would always have an extra activity which each of the groups would do if they completed the main task for the lesson.
The good aspects of my lesson which both my tutor and my peers thought were the way I differentiated at the beginning of the lesson. By identifying the ability groups and colour coding the objectives they clearly understood what they had to achieve by end of the session. Also the information provided to them meant it was student lead learning. This is where the students had to use the information provided to be able to answer the questions.
This was a brilliant experience, and hopefully my first step to a long and successful career as a teacher.
YM86 