Fieldwork Reflection

I wouldn't have chosen better colleagues to work with. I am so proud of my group and how well we taught 5th grade Social Studies!!!!

I learned a lot about team work and the importance of planning a lesson. First, everyone has to be able to meet at the same time so we can all put our ideas together and each be working on some part of the lesson. I also leaned how important it is for everyone to know their role on the day of teaching and know the content that they are teaching. We assigned and reviewed what slides each of us in the group would be teaching, and what each teacher candidate would be doing during our lesson in front of the class. For example, one of us is in charge of giving the students a flag for following directions. One of us was in charge of handing out the worksheets that we provided for the students and walk around during the lesson to make sure the students are filling in the note sheet and following along. This makes the lesson go more smoothly so we are not talking over each other and tripping over each other while teaching! I also learned how important it is to take everyone in your groups ideas into consideration. We all had great ideas, but had to narrow them down into one lesson plan. I learned how important it is to be aware of the time you have to teach, time management is so important because you want to give the students enough time to finish the activities and assignments. You want to have enough time to teach everything, but you don't want to spend to much time on one topic and end up running out of time to teach. So, I learned to keep the questions students had that were not about the lesson for the end of class.  We received such positive feedback on the observation reflections from our colleagues.  The only suggestions were to slow down on teaching the content during direct instruction, which is hard to do because we only have a certain amount of time to teach and have the students finish the activities.
The students in the 5th grade class taught me that you can never be over prepared for the questions that they are going to ask, or the way the class will behave. They were an awesome group of students and I cannot wait to have my own classroom someday!!! :)