Assignment: Taped Lesson Redux

Some thoughts on my second videotaped attempt at teaching: I've got a bit more poise. Of course, it helped to be teaching a class of 4 adults rather than 20 7th-graders. Body language, speaking volume, movement around the room were all good and improved from last time. There were significant holes in that poise though, the most unpleasant and embarassing of which has to be all the stuttering and hesitation in my set. Jeez. I was more nervous playing the part of a teacher last week than I was actually teaching during summer school, so I'm willing to blame some of that awful stuttering on my poor acting abilities. It definitely wasn't easy asking questions of my peers as if they were middle-schoolers while being prepared for--even expecting--their appropriately grad-student level responses. But even still, it was horribly mortifying (wasn't this something I had gotten over, more or less?) to watch and couldn't have been easy for students to understand. The real deal in the fall may not feel contrived and intimidating for the same reasons, but I'll undoubtedly be nervous, especially when it comes time for my principal or anyone else to evaluate me.

In terms of positive measures I can take to avoid all this, better preparation and familiarity with my lesson plan can help. I sounded a lot better once the set was finished; my big problem seemed to be with not knowing the line of questioning I wanted to take. I'd struggle to form a question the right way, when I should really know beforehand (by heart) how I want the questions in my set to follow each other.

There were other things that I'm also concerned about: not being consistent and specific with student praise; getting stuck in a single questioning strategy, especially the order of student's name and question; sounding tentative in transitions and while introducing activities; and weak-sounding or nonexistent reminders of group procedures. Let's hope I can speak clearly enough to even begin working on those.

Thankfully, I'm pretty sure the rest of the week went better than that lesson looked. With proper reflection, improvement is pretty much unavoidable. And that's encouraging.