This post is about my second last day of placement.
On Thursday the class had specialist classes which I tagged along to. First up they had Italian, then they had PE. Another student teacher came while we were in Italian, she is from RMIT and was there to observe the class as part of an assignment about student engagement. She stayed for the 2 specialist classes and the humanities lesson that I gave directly after. She was not there for the whole day as she had already gotten what she needed.
After specialist the class and I entered the room and my mentor teacher told his class that I was taking the lesson then left me to take controll of the class. I wonder what the other student teacher (who was in her first year) thought of my lesson?
My mentor teacher had let me plan this lesson and decide what I was going to do, the only guideline I had was that it had to be on Bushrangers.
I started the class with a powerpoint. I wanted to have something for the students to look at, something that would make sure that I had their attention and the powerpoint which had a good balance of words and images definately did that. I had no problem with classroom mangement.
So the powerpoint was up ans showing the title page which had the title and a picture of a bushranger in the Kelly gang's armour. I started off by asking students what they knew about bushrangers. Then I started going through the powerpoint asking questions as I went through it. I was glad to see the students were engaged and answered my questions and were genuinely interested in the topic.
Sometimes a student would put their hand up while I was still speaking. I would finish my sentence and ask them to speak. After I had finished teaching my Mentor teacher said that I should finish my explanations for the slide in their entirety before letting the students ask questions as I might be answering the question further in my explanation and their hand would go down. I agree with him and it was a nice tip to know.
Another thing that my mentor teacher said was that he liked when I said to the students that I didn't know something and suggested to them that they could look it up on their own. This came out of a disccussion on the death penalty. This discussion while we were having it had a lot of potential to be distracting from the real topic and I was proud of myself for not letting it go on to long and cutting it off so we could get back to learning about bushrangers.
Another comment that he had was that I need to make my expectations clear. Once they were doing the activity I had a few students asking if it should be done in pen or pencil. My mentor teacher said that if i get multiple people asking the same thing a good thing to do would be to stop the class and give an answer to the whole class.
I learnt a lot from that one lesson. It went better than my small group lesson teaching figurative language on Wednesday and I was really proud of myself. It felt really good to be up their in front of students.