Personal Narrative: What I Learned About Teaching

What Went Well The content of the lessons went well, for lack of a better phrase. I knew my stuff, and the activities were planned well. (It helped that my mentor teacher had already taught the lessons a number of times and was able to give me good material to work with for the lessons.) I overplanned for both lessons, which was great. I hate the feeling of being left with time and nothing for the kids to do or learn still, so my overplanning helped me evade that. Because the activities were planned well and relatively well sequenced, the students were relatively engaged during the lessons. I did not have too many behavior issues due to a lack of engagement or understanding what to do, which was wonderful. Something else I did was make notes to myself during down times in order to be able to modify my instruction for future classes. Second hour is always the guinea pig class: I would try something out, teach my lesson as planned, then see what happened. From there, I would learn what works in …show more content…
I am all about kids learning to think for themselves and build an understanding of concepts for themselves, but it is so much harder to do than it sounds. In the moment, it is so much easier to almost give a student an answer rather than help them learn to understand it. I know this is something I will get better at with practice, but it is definitely harder than I thought it would be. I have also learned that technology can be such a time saver and can aid in student understanding. In the first lesson, students compared graphs they created from a data set. It took about five minutes to do those graphs on Google Sheets, and everyone got (or should have gotten) the same graphs. If the graphs had been done on paper, there would have been so much more potential for students to get answers that were very incorrect. Tech helped so much with encouraging students’ understanding of the