Learning Letter

Overall this has been one of my favorite courses at Eastern. It looked at many different aspects f teaching while letting us actually getting on our feet and doing so. I think my favorite activity was the mini lesson. Even though the lesson was only 20 minutes it gave me the opportunity to actually teach a real lesson. The only other lesson I taught was for students that ranged age 7-14 and it was for a creative dramatics class. The only downside to that lesson was that we were able to tell our classmates who they are and they were respectful the whole time. In a real high school classroom there will be students that are disrespectful and don’t want to do the work. I also enjoyed the book talk because it gave me the opportunity to see all the different kinds of books out there that students my age are interested in and also books that I could use in my classroom as well. One the books I specifically remember was  “Wonder”. There’s also a movie coming out soon based on this book so I think that is why I took such interest. Although al lot of people have problem with books being made into movies I’m always excited to see what someone’s vision is on screen. This book could also be great to use in the classroom because you could show clips from the movie and it has a really great lesson to it. The unit plan was the part I struggled with the most. It was my first ever creating a unit plan and lesson plans at that. Going back I would have planned out better when I should have had certain sections done by, especially the lessons plans because I didn’t realize how long just one of them took. Giving myself deadlines always helps, but for some reason I thought I would be fine because for this big project because we had at least one section due in class per week. If I would of given myself more deadlines it probably could have been a lot stronger and more detailed.
Another aspect of this class that I enjoyed was the amount of articles and resources that were provided that we can use in our classroom. My favorite journal we used was “Discussion as a Way of Teaching”. I also used this in my unit plan when I had discussion days. There is lot of pieces of the journal that would be helpful in any classroom. The rules it provides for effective discussion, different types of discussion techniques, and how to problem solve when things go wrong. As a student myself I dreaded classroom discussion and usually kept quiet most of the time unless I was super comfortable with all of my classmates. Usually I wouldn’t say something because I was embarrassed that I would say something wrong or sound stupid. The only way I was actually comfortable talking is if I knew I had to and it wasn’t just volunteer based. There are different examples of how to help a student like me.
This directly correlates with my behavior in class. I feel like I would only respond if I absolutely had to because I felt like I was further behind than a lot of my classmates. I did make a couple friends that were sitting around me in class and that helped me be more social in small group setting but I still struggled with large group discussion. I think this will improve over time and has definitely improved in the course of this class. I will truly miss this class and everyone in it, it got me a lot more excited about teaching as well.

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