Career Long Learning

I have a great opportunity at my practicum to try different things out, get feedback, and change things before I teach the same lesson again. With me teaching my Science lessons to more than one class and having the ability to work with multiple groups over a couple days in Centers it means I can get feedback, reflect and change a lesson and immediately teach it again. An example of this would be from Science this week. In the first lesson I did not have any time planned for a class discussion of their test results, but they were very engaged in it and the class ended up running long. In the second class I was able to move things around in order to leave an extra 5 minutes for this discussion time.

Another example would be in centers time where I have a smaller group. I like the ability to realize that something might not be working, or that some problem-solving prompts work better than others and then try to implement them with the next group. I never realized how much work goes into planning a centers type lesson. A lot of pre-teaching is required to make sure they know exactly where to go and what to do.

My main goal for lesson planning is to try and find a way to spend less time on creating them while keeping the quality up. I am finding that PowerPoints are my greatest tool right now as it is easy to reuse slides that have instructions or timers on them instead of reinventing the wheel. It also is a great way to stay on task and keep to a schedule.