When planning a lesson, many different factors are incorporated in it. You not only have to think about the material you are teaching, but how you will teach it. If a student doesn't understand, how can you explain it another way? You have to think about the materials you have access to and how much time you can spend on different parts of the lesson. While lesson planning, everything you do has to relate back to the students. You often think, "Does that wording sound right?" "Will they be able to see this font color/size?" For example, my group and I knew we wanted to incorporate a video into our lesson, but we also knew the speakers weren't very loud, so we had to plan accordingly and tell the students beforehand that they had to be super super quiet or else no one would be able to hear. While planning a lesson, you have to make sure you incorporate enough information for the students to understand, but not too much where they get confused.
Having a lesson plan organized and printed is great, but when it comes to actually teaching that lesson, it might not work out like that. For our lessons, we had certain slides assigned to each of us so we would know what we would be teaching. When it came to my slides, the computer froze and they wouldn't load all of the information. This could have been an issue if I wasn't prepared, but luckily I was. I knew the information I had to teach and I was able to teach it and improvise until the powerpoint loaded again. You also might come to realize that what is written on your lesson plan isn't actually going to work in the classroom, so again you have to come up with a quick solution on what will work. You also have to remember that a lesson can be planned a certain way, but that might not be how it works out because kids are kids, and sometimes they might not have it all together, just like us adults some days.
Teaching a whole 4th grade class taught me that:
1. I definitely want to be a teacher
2. Teaching isn't something that is going to be easy
3. Lesson planning can be hard and getting the students to listen can be hard, but once the lessons are taught and you see how much they learned, it is a reward.
I'm not usually a big fan of working in groups, but while we were going through the lesson planning and teaching process, I'm glad I had them. The first time we sat down together to begin lesson planning, we suddenly became overwhelmed. There was so much to do that we hadn't realized before, and we didn't know where to start. Once we began though, we were unstoppable. It was great being in a group, bouncing ideas back and forth until we came up with one that we all agreed would work. This made the experience seem more realistic because when we become teachers we will be able to talk to our colleagues and get ideas about what worked for them. Working with a group helped the lesson planning process go more smoothly, along with teaching the students.
Designing direct instruction lessons is more about the information that you're teaching and how you are going to explain it for each student to understand. You really have to know what you're teaching and be prepared for any questions that could be asked. At the same time, you want to make sure that you aren't planning on teaching all of this information in a boring way. You need to be presenting it in a way that will make them pay attention and want to learn.
Designing an inquiry lesson is about putting the information you learned to the test. These are more fun to plan because you want to make it even more engaging for the students. Instead of having to stick solely to information, you are able to take the learned information and turn it into an activity that will further their understanding and knowledge.
Although I went into this experience feeling nervous and unsure, I came out of it ready to do it again! I can't wait until I am able to have my own classroom and my own students.
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