Teaching Reflection

Working with the Environmental Leadership Program (ELP) gave me an opportunity to grow as an educator; three places where I saw the most growth were in my lesson flow, ability to adapt quickly, and in my classroom management skills. During my teaching experience, I honed my lesson flow by ensuring that my lessons began with a motivating start, recalling what we learned the past week of lessons, and using stories to build excitement for what was to come. Similarly, I improved my lesson flow by revisiting my curriculum to implement more inquiry-based discussions as a way to teach topics. For example, while watching other ELP teachers introduce our first week of lessons, I realized that in my excitement to tell the students what the program was about, I had accidentally written in 10 minutes of solid talking! I quickly took out my lesson plan add changed the format, so that each piece of information I gave the students started or ended with a question for them to think about and answer. As with most teaching experiences, various challenges arose, ones relating to technology, as well as, quick changes in schedule: both time to teach and weeks in the curriculum. One week, we arrived at the school and were told we’d only have 25 minutes to teach instead of the 45 we had planned for. I was able to look over the lesson plan and our learning objectives and condense the lesson to make sure that students left with the most important information for that week- and it flowed so smoothly that the students had no idea we had cut so much out! Accommodating for these challenges on the spot gave me the practice to develop my comfort and aptitude for adaptation. The third, and perhaps most robust place I feel like I have grown, is in my classroom management techniques. Throughout my time teaching, I cultivated a deeper understanding of the importance of pre-corrects, laying out expectations at the beginning of the class activity to best set students up for success. Likewise, I learned to utilize moments of movement, having students stand and stretch, and mimic animal movements that we’re learning about in order to release energy and refocus the classroom. Lastly, I grew in my ability to regain class attention and come back from independent work time. This included feeling comfortable calling class attention to myself and waiting until I had all eyes on me before continuing. Overall, I grew into myself as an educator, learning methods and tools to set my students and myself up for great success.