Personal Narrative: My Clinical Teaching Experience

There has been much to take away from this experience. I have learned a lot about myself, my teaching style, students, the pedagogical methods of teaching mathematics, and likely many other things which I have yet to process. At the onset of this semester, I chose two different goals that I wanted to reach as I progressed through my clinical teaching experience. Those goals were to be more flexible with the way I teach, and leave my comfort zone of direct instruction and involve the students more in the learning process. Throughout my time at Cedar Cliff High, I have been able to notice progress toward those goals each of different proportion but progress nonetheless. I am pleased with the progress I have made during this experience and anticipate …show more content…
Typically, I would plan a lesson, or have a certain vision in my head on how I would want my class to go and stick to it hardcore. While this may be a good to have an idea of how you would like things to go and execute it, I wanted to make sure that when I explained the concepts the students understood even if it meant going off script for me. The more I got in front of the class and taught, the more comfortable I felt with making mistakes in front of the class and fixing them. I was really paranoid that I would make a mistake while teaching and thus destroying my credibility to the students. However, I realized this could be beneficial in a number of ways. I could ask the students to find my error which will force them to think critically about the concepts we have discussed. It will show them that I too make mistakes. I am not a perfect mathematician and I must continue to work on my skills despite my years of studying mathematics. Finally, it is good for them to see that you need to struggle through problems occasionally in mathematics. I am not implying that I need to take all class period to find an error or even that I should not work on fixing my mistakes. I am merely saying that when this does occur, for me to take the time to find a dropped negative or a multiplication error could be beneficial to my students. Because of this, I am not as uptight any more with the way I am running my class. I realize that I do not have to be on script for every part of the class in order for the class to be a success. If my students have learned during my class I have succeeded in my goal regardless of how we arrive