Fieldwork Experience

Throughout this fieldwork experience, I have learned a lot of important things when it comes to lesson planning, implementing the lesson plans into the classroom, and working with my colleagues to design the lessons.

My groupmates and I were best friends so we had a really easy time getting along and designing the lesson plans.  Some of the things that we need to keep in mind when we were designing the first lesson, which was the direct instruction lesson were what the students knew from the pre-assessment that we gave them and what they did not know.  We also had to make sure that we were covering all the material that we included in the textbook that the students were using.  It was important that we included the key vocabulary terms from the chapter and make sure that the students were taking notes down throughout the lesson.  We provided the students with a special sheet for taking notes.  We also had to make sure that we had enough activities for the guided practice to make sure that the students are grasping the concepts.  We would also have check for understanding slides throughout our presentation to help see if the students understood the material that we just taught.  During our direct instruction lesson, we ran short on time and our activities for our guided practice did not go as planned and the students were a little confused as to what was going on.  I think that if we had planned a different activity than the students would have had more time to practice with the material.  When we were planning our inquiry and cooperative learning lessons we needed to keep in mind how we were going to group the students since it was kind of a wild class.  We also had to remember the scientific method for the inquiry lesson and we needed to make sure that the students understood that before moving on to the rest of the lesson.  In cooperative learning, we needed to plan the different roles that each of the students was going to have and how the students were going to self-evaluate at the end of the lesson.

Some of the things that my group had to keep in mind when we were teaching our lessons in the classroom were if the students were paying attention and retaining the information, this is why we had the notepad and we also used different strategies to check for understanding.  Some of the strategies that we used were thumbs up/down, and turn and talk with a partner.

This was the first education class where we were getting to work in groups to plan and teach lessons in the classroom, we were also teaching to the whole class.  Since my colleagues and I got along well it was easy to work on the lesson plans and implement them in the classroom.

After teaching my lesson it was good to watch the other groups teach their lessons and see the different kinds of strategies that they implemented into their lessons.  Each of the groups had a different way to get the students attention when the students were getting too loud.

This experience overall was a great learning experience.  The different techniques and lessons that I learned throughout this fieldwork will definitely help me in my future teaching career.