Other Teaching Groups

There was a total of four groups to teach our second grade class. I was in the third group, so this blog will focus on the three other groups that taught the class.

The first group, being the most difficult because they went first, they did a wonderful job. They had four perspective teachers. Their topic was goods and services. Their three lessons focused on what a good is and what a want is. They seemed to work well together and planned efficiently. What I learned from this group is how a teacher needs to fully think about everything regarding all types of students. I learned how to properly create an evaluation for group/self work. The class we were in, the students were too young to evaluate the group work, so a teacher needs to be able to identify when that is the case and change it to an appropriate way. For this class, it would be a self evaluation.

The second group also had four teachers. Their lessons were about services in our community. I really loved how their direct lesson-their first lesson, they all dressed up as different services, for example: a police officer. They separated their teaching into different elements of the lesson and it worked for each of them.

The third group was my group.

The fourth group to teach was about banks and money. They seemed to be very knowledgeable about this topic. It was interesting to see the three of them teach because they all seemed to be  different types of teachers but they worked well together. The three of them worked very well by means of assigning roles on the lesson. For each lesson, it seemed that they took the same elements for each lesson. They grew strong for their individual parts; however, I'm not sure if they did this on purpose or if that is just a coincidence!

Cooperative Learning

The third type of lesson my group and I taught was cooperative learning. This is all about each person has a specific task to all work together as a group to complete the entire task that is being asked. The way my class was taught to remember this was with an acronym of PIGS and then Face to face. This lesson the students had to work together to become a factory and create an ad. Each student was a manager and had the task of either writing the slogan, drawing, designing, creating the price, etc. The students seemed to love the creative element of this task. I did realize that assigning roles would be challenging to we let the students work together.
The students had the chance to present their ad with the class once everyone was finished and the teachers and I had the listening students guess what the factory was. They all seemed to really enjoy this element of the lesson.
My wish for the future is that as a class, we went over how to properly present and how to properly listen to a group presenting. The students, I noticed, got shy and turned away when present or spoke too quietly. While the listeners did their own work or their focus was not on the group presenting. If we had the chance to go back and had a little bit more time, I would have spoke about this.

Teaching Inquiry

For the second lesson, my group and I had to teach an inquiry lesson. This lesson I focused on writing the lesson plan. By this point, my group and I learned about each other and how each of us work. Inquiry is the idea that a problem needs to be solved. The class we were working with find group work exciting, but they can get too loud or off topic easy. My two cooperating teachers and I really tried to keep every student focused. They really seemed to enjoy working with their peers. I learned a lot from doing group work with the class because as a teacher, they must keep on top of the entire class, not just the group they are working closely with.
We used a fairly new technology to me: a Voki. A Voki is an animated figure that speaks whatever you type it to say. We created the Voki to present our problem: the truck driver needs to deliver goods and does not know where to start and finish. The students seemed to find it very funny and knew exactly what the problem is. As a backup, we printed out a letter as to what the Voki exactly said. This also was beneficial to hand out and have the students read along with the voice speaking or go back to re-read the problem.

Direct Teaching

I have finally taught in front of an entire class. While I had two partners and we worked as a team, it was quite the learning experience. Working as a group to teach a lesson is quite the challenge. All three of us have unique ideas and opportunities to fulfill our dreams. By each of us having ideas, we had the opportunity to challenge each other to see how can we create the best lesson possible. at first there were so many worksheets. Probably too many for our second graders. We decided to throw some technology into the lesson replacing two of the worksheets. One of them was a vortex Smartboard game placing phrases into two category. The other was a tic-tac-toe game.

What was great about it was it got the students so excited and involved with the lesson. The downer was when we arrive at the classroom...their technology was not up to date so all of our games would not work! Thank goodness we had backups! I knew from prior experience, not mine own,- but watching others, that when using technology...ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP. I printed out the slides onto paper to have a manual opportunity in case this happened...thanks goodness I did because we needed that wonderful backup option. This also went really well even though the technology did not work. I learned also how loud the class gets when given the opportunity. This may just be this particular class, but it did get quite noisy when unexpected. while my first classroom experience was hopeful for an amazing, perfect lesson, reality does kick in and challenges come up. I appreciate the challenges because they will happen in the future and while I am officially a teacher. It has taught me so much more than any lecture or textbook could. I could have been told or read about challenges, but unless the situation pops up into a future lesson, le
arning can only happen when tried.