The
big event this week was videotaping myself teaching. Last week I had my
observed lesson which was a little nerve wrecking. However, I’m building up my
confidence as time goes on. The real problem this week wasn’t nerves but just
legal red tape. I had discussed the assignment with my teacher and she informed
me that the school didn’t have a videotaping policy so I would need written consent
from parents. I had a permission slip ready to go the previous week and even
offered an incentive (ice cream) if the whole class returned the slips on the
following Tuesday. Only three students returned with their slips. I blame
myself for giving out the permission slips before a four day weekend. I now had
to do my videotaping on Thursday. To make matters worse, I had scheduled to
teach my lesson that day and couldn’t back out of it. The whole school had a
late start that day for a faculty meeting so I was short on time and didn’t get
a chance to go over the assignment in detail. Because my assignment was large
enough to be considered a project, I decided to do a sort of review day the
next time we met. On Thursday, eight students still did not have their
permission slips. I planned on having them sit in the back of the classroom and
just crop them out of the video but my teacher thought that was still too
risky. She decided to take those eight students out into the hall while one of
my students recorded the lesson. I felt terrible that some kids might be left
out and I did my best to fill them in on everything we discussed. The idea just
occurred to me that I should have just shown them the video. It’s such an
obvious solution and I just now thought of it. Anyways, I was pleased enough
with the lesson/review. My biggest problem was consistency with my instruction.
I had written this assignment using the general language I was familiar with
but I had forgotten that the students had a very specific method to writing. I
told them to write an outline but they use something called a Fey method to
organize their paper. They accomplish the same end result, but that small
difference in language was enough to confuse them. The next day I brought in an
example to show what the completed assignment should look like. There were some
long pauses in my instruction and questioning that served as good wait time.
And I noticed that students felt more comfortable asking questions at the end
of my instruction rather than during. So when students asked questions
afterwards, I redirected the questions to the whole class. Involving the whole
class includes students that might be too shy to ask questions and allows the
students to explain an idea better than I can. I ended up answering most of the
questions myself, but I thought it was worth trying.
