My Second Teaching Experience

My Second Teaching Experience

Thankfully Wynne provided me with the text last week that I used for this week’s lesson.  The text was obtained from the site Newslea.com which allows one to adapt the text level to the student being taught.  The article that Wynne selected is PRO/CON:  Should workers in fast food restaurants make more money?  I decided to split the lesson into 2, one week I would do the pros and the next week I am going to do the cons.  I provided 2 handouts, one that allowed the student to gather evidence for the next handout which was a summary of what they read.  I also used Barbara Gleason’s suggestion of creating a timed lesson plan.  The lesson was timed as follows:  5 minutes explanation of task, 10 minutes reading and marking up the text, 15 minutes establishing the evidence, 15 minutes for each group to pick a piece of evidence and post it on the board for their group and discuss, and 15 minutes to write the summary. 

The text, although it used easy words, was rather shallow on the evidence.  The evidence consisted mostly of author claims that were largely unsupported.  I think that this was a difficult text, because as a writer, you had to latch onto the flimsiest statements to use as a basis for a summary.  I think that this was a fantastic challenge to the class, because it allowed for confidence building.  Even with the flimsiest statements, the class succeeded in finding the evidence.  I was impressed.

I realized the flimsiness of the text while I was teaching.  The whole time I was putting it together it looked great in terms of it being an appropriate level of text for the class.  Being able to find materials to teach with is the hard part of lesson planning.   I realize that teaching is similar to writing in that as you are engaged in the process, unpredictable learning occurs.

I collected the essays and I have read through them.  Jason coached me to read through them, write one good thing that I observe and then to make a list of these observations to that I could use this as a basis for a class discussion before we move onto the Cons. 

When I was being told about what is required from me to complete this class, the 4 lesson plans equated in my head to 4 essays.  Nothing could have been further form the truth.  Lesson plans may not look complex, but they are very complex in terms of implementation.  The idea of the lesson plan is to put together a strategy to teach something.  The effectiveness of the lesson has to be based on the student understanding what you initially set out to teach them and this perhaps should be measured after you have tried to teach the point in several ways.

I have spent so many years observing teaching, and yet I am such a beginner teacher.  I am thankful to Wynne and Jason for their excellent coaching.  I feel that I took a leap in the 2^nd lesson.