Whole group teaching video - Chapter 3

Watching this video of myself, I had to first laugh that I was still wearing my substitute tag on my shirt. :)

I was able to utilize a classroom and have a couple of the girls stay after school with me in order to videotape our lesson together. I wish I had been able to use the smart board system to teach the lesson. I think it would have been a lot more effective and helpful to the girls if they had been able to see better, and have things appear a little bigger and more clearly. This is a definite disadvantage I have had trying to do this assignment, and think had I been a regular classroom teacher, things definitely would have worked differently. But, I worked with the resources I had and the girls were amazing and the "chaos" as I saw it, didn't seem to faze them.

This has been a fun experience for me to get back into my 'teacher shoes' so to speak. I have been out of a classroom for 11 years and the thought of having to teach again after so many years, was, quite frankly, daunting to me. Would I remember what to do? Would I still have a connection to the students? Would I still have the ability to have effective classroom management? I am happy to say that it was like the old adage, 'it's like riding a bicycle.' Things just fell into line for me. I had spent a little time last year substituting, but for the most part, this fall has been my step back into teaching. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it. Being in this class has energized me for the future, and for that I'm really grateful and excited!

Looking back on the tape, there are things I think I did well. I introduced our lesson with a tie in from the previous lesson we had. I told them what we were going to be doing, what would follow and what I expected. I think this is important as it helps the students have a 'purpose' for what we are doing and not just because we 'have' to do it. I provided sentences and gave examples and provided them an opportunity to give their answers. I also thought it was nice I thought to have a couple different ones to the same question and pointed out that they were different and that's what made it so great. Same sentence..... totally different context or meaning when you add different words or phrases. I remember the girls smiling at this. They all seemed eager to give their answers, but that might have been because they knew it was on video, but for the most part, in the past, they had been eager too. I think perhaps it might have been helpful to have had some boys in the group. I did find myself making an effort throughout my sub day that day, to think back over class discussions to notice if I called on more girls than boys. I think I did a good job of getting to both. I didn't favor one over the other. And I don't think I've ever had a problem with this in the past.

Things I didn't do well: I thought I was too fast. I think I moved to quickly through the examples and perhaps didn't explain them well enough. I thought they knew the point and the extended examples I was giving were what I was looking for. Perhaps I needed more examples to start and more sentences for us to work on as a whole group. As we get into the small group lesson, I noticed that were adding only 1 or 2 words, and not phrases like we had discussed in this lesson. That is definitely something I would add in future lessons. But, that might be more able to happen had I used a different method of presentation rather than the overhead machine which was available to me. Perhaps with my follow-ups I could have garnered more information from them or pulled more out of them to get the responses to be a little longer. But again, that goes back to I should have had more examples for us to work on together. I was thinking in my mind that I would be doing that in the small groups, and this was just an introduction. Perhaps THIS critique better belongs in my small group discussion.