I taught my science lesson today to a first grade class. Throughout my lesson I was thinking to myself about what to do and what not to do as far as the SATIC coding goes. I thought it would be easy, but it was not. I felt during class we all would be laughing or joking about some of the "silly" things that we should never do that those teachers in the videos were doing. After my lesson today I definitely caught myself doing them! When I was watching the videos in class I knew what was "not appropriate" and what we were aiming for, but when I got into the situation myself I either got caught off guard which took me back to old habits or I just didn't notice what I was doing.
I felt like I had to give a fair amount of directions, which I think you need to do in the younger grades. I felt I did well with asking thought provoking questions and using students comments or ideas to springboard into other questions. Although I was asking many questions, I sometimes got tripped up with how to ask a question either without giving the answer away or wording it properly for the students to understand.
I watched about half of my video after I did my lesson and some things that I noticed that I struggled with was: I did ask a rhetorical question....oops. I have a problem with confirming students answers when I know they are right even though I tried to remember to just say okay thank you or count with my fingers. I also found myself have of the time asking the student to clarify, but sometimes I would do it for them because it took them like ten minutes to articulate what they wanted to say!
This blog is getting rather lengthy and I'm sorry about that, but another thing I run into in other lessons as well as this one is I asked a lot of questions today in my lesson. In first grade, students tend to keep their hand raised the whole day and after you call on them to answer your question they either stray away and comment on something totally off or give a completely wrong answer. I just don't know how to deal with that yet. Today I was still on the concept of balance, but I felt like I was all over the place with my questions because of the random stuff the students were saying.
Strategies that I could use to improve would be to practice, practice, and more practice. There is no way I can get better unless I continue to break bad habits by practicing the new ones. Just like in sports you practice to become the best player and in teaching I need to practice to become the best teacher. I also find it extremely helpful to videotape lessons. I am seriously contemplating buying a flip video camera. I can learn from what I have done and it is kind of hard to forget how bad you were when you have it on video!
