Today we had the opportunity to present our lessons. I know that as I was preparing over the weekend, I took a lot of things into consideration. First, I wanted my lesson to be interesting and engaging to the students. I wanted to speak and write clearly, so that the material would be easily understood. I also wanted to make sure that I gave them enough information as to make the lesson useful (not just for fun, but with a purpose). It wasn't until I typed things up last night that I began to work out the timing of my lesson. I found this step really difficult! Aside from predicting in my head how long it would take for me to teach the lesson, I really had no way of knowing how much time I should allocate to writing the material on the board, or how much "wiggle room" I should give in case there were some good questions, or in case the class really didn't understand the material. I think I found this difficult because I don't really have a lot of practice teaching to a class. Also, I don't a have chalk board at home to practice on, and I don't think my husband would appreciate me buying one (that would potentially be the final step over to geek-hood).
Any suggestions out there as to how you can work out the timing of your lesson, and how much "wiggle room" you should leave?
Also, I'm wondering if anyone prepared for an alternate teaching approach on the off chance that their approach didn't work for the students.
(in case anyone is wondering, the picture in this post is of The Wiggles... a children's group)
6 comments:
I think you should sort of prepare a big lesson...and then if you run out of time, you can always carry on from where you left off the next day. Or sometimes you can plan some activities that you can skip if you run out of time, or ones that you could do another day with another topic. It's better to have too much than to run out ... but if you have 10 minutes left you can always give them time to start their homework!!
That's the thing with courses like chemistry, or math, there will almost always be some homework assignments that can be done if you scheduled too much time. It is high school after all, they should have time to atleast start their homework during class time. If you were already planning on giving them class time to start their homework, then you can factor that into your "wiggle room". Some days you might have to take some of that time (not too much hopefully), and other days you might give them extra time because the lecture part went so smoothly. I would probably plan for 10 minutes of "wiggle room"...
You can always leave off sections of your lecture if its too long and start with those topics the next day.
I did not plan for an alternative way of explaining my lesson, but I only had 20 minutes, and I really wanted to get to the activity part of my lesson, so I wasn't going to give you guys the oppertunity to get an alternative explanation. In a real classroom situation, I might think of some alternative examples so I wouldn't have to think them up on the spot.
I think a good way to gauge how much time it will take is to run through your lesson the day before you are going to teach it. You can time your self for the lecture portion of the lesson and then do all the worksheets/activities and add on a couple minutes to each one. This should account for the extra time it will take your students to complete the activities. Like Alicia said, it's always a good idea to have a contingency plan in case you have extra time or one of your activities is not working out (always better to be over prepared). Another thing to remember when planning lessons is to leave some extra time for making groups and students "farting around". Lastly, if you've gone through all of your lesson and extras and there is still time left over you can always fall back on seven up!
hahaha... I love 7up!
When i was teaching in Taiwan I started off not knowing a thing about classroom management, how to teach the english curriculum given to me or how to handle the cultural differences. One of the advantages of this situation was that I had to make due with what i had and also i was able to improvise a lot in my teachings. After a while, I got the hang of planning out lessons though and this greatly eased my anxiety about teaching. There were times where I had to use my "wiggle" abilities and improvise in order to keep the students interested. In some cases where the students were on top of things and got all of the work done before the end of class, i would be forced to think of other ways and like Spencer said, games are a great way to kill time and make the class a fun and engaging atmostphere. As long as the students leave the class with a smile on their face and thoughts running through their mind, then you have done your job!
I realized, while presenting my lesson how easily I distract myself. I am fairly confident but just stopped thinking. I will admit that i did not spend a lot of time on it, but when i prepared it i had something completely different in mind. However, I do realize that this would have played out differently in an actual classroom with students learning social studies curriculum instead of to my peers who have various levels of previous knowledge on the subject. Upon reflection, I would make the lesson plan either really specific or really general...it seems i got stuck in the middle by assuming too much and not giving enough.... it was a valuable experience i suppose. I took note of some basics that I may have to work on.... thank you to my peers for your helpful comments and your awesome lesson plans. I really did learn a lot...especially about myosis!!
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