4 posts tagged “video”

This reminds me of the "We are the Fighting Irish" ads they play during ND football games.  Danielle Hall, Notre Dame and MTC alum, is featured in this recruitment/information video about the Mississippi Teacher Corps:

Do you want the good news or the bad news?

The good news:

I think my overall comfort, classroom management (of which there is little because of the makeup of my class), and teaching (by this I mean explanations, questioning, and generally getting information from my head to the heads of my students) is improving and pretty good overall.  My lesson was effective and the I interacted well with the students, using a lot of informal assessment via questioning and observation as they worked on their own.  Related to this, I've also improved on my communication, that is to say I talk a little slower and I break things down more effectively with better examples than I did before.

The bad news:

My lesson planning still needs some work.  I'm still struggling with breaking things down all the way.  I just said I've improved in this, but I still have a ways to go.  In this lesson I can see that my students stayed with me in the beginning, but I began to lose them near the end of the block when I was transitioning to explaining a more difficult concept.  Because of this, I lost them and I don't think they mastered my second objective as fully as I would like.  I need to continue to break things down and plan more time for independent practice, especially for more difficult topics.  I think that if I bite off a little less in each lesson this will be easier.  The transition from 50 minutes periods to 100 minute blocks has hurt my ability to do this some, but has also exposed me to how long 100 minutes is and how much I can fit in.  I'll get there.  I think I'll like working with a block schedule in JPS.

The bottom line:

Compared to my first videotaped lesson, I think I have improved, if subtly.  I still need to work on the same things as I did in that lesson, namely the speed at which I talk and time management, but its getting better.  I also think that my lessons are still and continue to be effective in that the students are engaged for the most part and meet the objectives.  We'll see if this stays true once I have to spend more energy managing the classroom.  I just hope that doesn't cause me to sacrifice too much from my lesson.

I stumbled upon this clip on youtube and found it kind of interesting.  It doesn't quite relate directly to the students we'll be teaching, but it is a reflection of the system most of us are products of.  Kind of a "The World as a Village" of college students.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the lesson on the life cycle of stars that I videotaped.  I think that the students understand the sequence of events and the scale on which it occurs.  I don't really know what else to say about the overall effectiveness of the lesson... Oh, they were pretty engaged in an activity where I had them make a kind of time line for the life cycle of the sun and then make an analogous time line for the life cycle of humans.  They were working on this before lunch and when I told them to line up for lunch, all four of the kids stayed in their seats and kept working.  I had to repeat myself for them to stop working and stand up.  Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm taking that as a good sign of interest.

I feel really uncomfortable with the rubric and assessing myself based on its parameters.  That's a huge problem I have with the way things are at Holly Springs.  I really have no bearing on where I stand compared to other people and where I should be.  That's not completely true, as I have been assessed, but I'd like to see other people teach (besides just those in my classroom) and also see how others are evaluated so that I can calibrate my expectations to those of the evaluators and TEAM teachers.  I feel like a process like that would not only expose me to a number of other teaching styles, creative ideas, and classroom dynamics, but also would help me to more objectively evaluate my own teaching on any given day.  As it stands now, basically my only two criteria for the effectiveness of my lesson are: 1) did the kids answer my informal assessment questions correctly most of the time, and 2) were they active participants with a little excitement in their body language.  If the answer to these two questions is "yes", then I feel like my lesson was effective.  But I've had lessons where the answers were "sort of" to these 2 questions and received favorable evaluations.  I just wish I had more experience with the evaluation process and was better able to apply it for my own benefit and the benefit of my colleagues, now that we're doing daily informal assessment/comment sheets for other teachers in our classroom.

That being said (sorry for the diatribe), I can recognize a couple things about this particular lesson.  First, everybody is right, and I recognize it while I'm teaching as well.  I talk too fast.  Shocking, I know.  I've heard that this is one of the more common problems, and I definitely have it.  In this particular lesson I didn't stumble over my own tongue, but that has happened.  It's not even nerves, either.  I just want to get stuff out and fit a lot on my lesson and just cram information into their heads and I need to slow down, plan a little bit less information into my lesson, and take my time going over things and repeating them.  I've started to do this, but I still notice that when I'm asked a question that isn't directly related to the lesson, or one that I may not be expecting, I kind of jump back into hyper drive and need to cut that out.  The second issue is my time management.  In this lesson I had two pretty good activities that were both cut a little short because I took too long on the Do Now and lectured too much.   Again, this goes to slowing everything down and planning less into the lesson, but its taking some getting used to for me.  On the one hand, I'm making sure my kids really understand things, which can slow me up, but on the other hand I cram too much stuff in the lesson, so I need to balance that out.