Reflection of Clinical Teachin Experience

   

Through this clinical teach experience I have realized that a lot goes into preparing a lesson for a class. We started preparing our lesson by each reading the chapter and writing down our own thoughts. We then came together and disused our ideas. We found that on some things we had similar ideas where on other things we all had completely different interpretations on the text. We took these different interpretations and came to an agreement on an idea that incorporates what we all think. At first this was a little bit of a challenge because some of our ideas were way off from others but through discussion we eventually got our ideas to be on the same page.

After getting everyone on the same page we started to form our lesson. We decided that we didn't want to do straight lecture or PowerPoint but instead we wanted to mix a PowerPoint in with activities. We started with find three or four main points that we could concentrate on to form our lesson around. From there we worked to come up with activities that could accompany these ideas. This was more challenge than I think we thought it would be.

Going into the meeting with Dr. Shutkin we thought we had a pretty good idea of what we were doing. Through discussion we found that we needed to incorporate more of how behaviorism plays into a student’s education. This is when we came up with doing the conditioning exercise. I don't think this worked out in class exactly how we planned. We hoped that the tables that weren't getting candy would eventually stop doing the activity; this was not the case though so therefore we were forced to explain the activity. Besides this activity I feel the rest of the lesson went well. I thought the card game at the beginning helped reinforce the idea of how those schools with more resources end up better off than the schools who have very little. Also during the lesson we knew that getting the class involved in discussion would be difficult but, for the most part I thought it went pretty good. The class started to respond more once we got into the lesson.

The lesson went pretty much as we planned except for at the end. We realized that we had a little extra time at the end so we decided to do a recap of what we had covered in the lesson. I thought this was a good idea because it helped reinforce the ideas we had previously discussed. Through this experience I have learned that planning lessons can be a big challenge. I thought it was very helpful to have other people to discuss my ideas of the reading with while planning the lesson. It has showed me that it is important to have other people to discuss lessons with when it comes to having my own classroom.