Week 2

My week 2 field experience in IPS gave me and Kasie a lot of opportunities to take an active teaching role in the class. We were tasked with teaching the lesson over electoral processes and different ways of voting to two Government classes. I was very nervous to teach an entire lesson for the first time, but I think it went relatively well. Because of the layout of the class, we were a little constricted on how we could teach the material. Each student has a packet of information for each Unit, and everyday of class they are to follow along with the teacher presentation and fill in the blanks in the packet. I do not completely agree with this teaching method, however it seems to be effective up to a certain point in the classroom. I feel that it is hard to get a lot of feedback from students and get discussions going because students are just listening to get the answers so they can complete their packets. However, throughout our presentation we tried to get some discussion going. It seemed that we got the most class input when talking about students being able to vote and how they can vote, because many of them will be voting in this election.
After our first lesson, we went over what we did well and the areas we can improve. Co-teaching a class is kind of weird and we realized we needed to work on our timing and communication. Both Kasie and I like to talk a lot and lead discussion so sometimes we were stepping on each others toes. I also learned that I needed to make sure I kept the volume of my voice up through an entire sentence or expression and make sure I do not let it taper off and turn away from the students. Also, I hope to be able to work on giving students more time to come up with ideas and questions when we pose a discussion. I think that when I ask a question or try to pose a discussion, I get worried when I hear a moment of silence and immediately want to jump in and try to get it going. Also, I need to continue working on learning how to play off of students interest when I hear them talk about them in class. After hearing about the methods we could work on I was interested in getting ready for the next class.

The next class however, was way more difficult to handle as far as classroom management. It seemed like the 30 minutes before lunch all of the students were restless, and after lunch the students had shut down. I think we did a better job in co-teaching the class, but it was hard to implement discussion critiques because class participation was way down.

Next week we are going to be teaching US History classes and I am excited because we also are doing Test Review. Why we do not get to cover new material with the class or really have a lot of time to pose discussion, we have way more freedom on how we can teach the class. I am hoping that this week will not be as hectic in my other classes and Kasie and I will get more of an opportunity to come up with a good lesson and test review for our classes.