Reflection on MicRoteaching

My Experience

Creating my lesson plans, I was able to see which activities would work well with different levels of students. Some activities that took a lot of time and complex actions wouldn't necessary help me in teaching certain skills needed with an argumentative and narrative piece of writing. In the grand overview of the unit plan, I was able to see the building process needed to create a draft that students would be passionate about and proud of. By dedicating days to build their outline and dissect different methods of creating their original writing pieces, I saw the work needed to create a working unit plan. Seeing the steps needed for students to reach the goal of the lesson, I was able to implement this way of writing papers to how I can write a piece of writing. Having deadlines along the way to the final draft, I can use these checkpoints to see how the process is going for the students and see what different writing methods they are using on their drafts. I can give them positive feedback and help them with any problems they are facing at these checkpoints. I also saw the importance of having mentor texts and different texts that could help provide them with different insights in the way to form of a writing piece. Lastly, I thought it was important to teach students the different ways someone can analyze the perspective of a piece and question the reasoning behind it as well.

What I thought really didn't work in my lesson and overall unit plan was the lack of opportunity to have discussions between the students about their answers to different questions. Next time I wish to create a student-drive conversation based on the answers from their peers in order to spell out a better understanding of the points. I also want to use a better quote that is easier for students to grasp and analyze, as this act can help them see the bigger picture of the lesson. In addition, I want to ask the students my essential question at the end in order to see if they were able to answer it and see the importance of connecting the activities they were doing in class. I felt more comfortable in front of the classroom, as it was in front of my peers that I was teaching the lesson to. Here, I knew they would be able to understand and participate with the activities to the degree that I wanted. Their perspective, however, was really helpful as their feedback in the way I handled the activity showed me points that I could work on before using this activity with real students. Overall, I felt comfortable in front of the class and I wasn't as nervous as I was last time. I felt that I was able to communicate my points to the class and they were able to understand the points I was trying to emphasize. The tug of war activity on paper sounded easy but when I had to write down the directions and physically paint the objectives of the activity, I had a hard time fully explaining it and picturing it in action. With full and reflective work, I was able to slow down the pace of the activity and break it down into a simpler form for the class.