Entering the real world... Teaching with REAL students! Micro-Unit

Playing with the big boys... means teaching to real, live, breathing high school students. 

It's kind of crazy that we (meaning my entire cohort) were exhausted after 3 days of simply teaching 1 class... I can't wait to see what that first week of teaching in the spring does to us with 5-7 classes a day :) 

Anyways, Central Mountain. I worked with Ms. Hack and taught the Wildlife and Fisheries class (3rd period) with a Habitat mini-unit. This included content about: habitat components, common PA habitats, carrying capacity, and limiting factors (natural and cultural). 

Day 1 was as day 1 as you would have expected. I thought I was pretty prepared and had a good handle on my content. However, we ran out of time and an activity that I had planned did not go as I anticipated (see photo) so I was a bit flustered. I had a few management cues to work on - giving time for students to process, giving clear directions, stamping out chatter from the start, etc. However, I think it went well considering I had a class of 30 students. There were definitely some notes from Mr. Seaman that I took into preparing for day 2. 

Trying to get them to do a circle sit when they didn't want to touch each other...  fail

 Day 2: the testing day. They kind of know who you are and how you work... so they begin to test you a bit. I had a cool activity planned (Project WILD shout out!) to reflect carrying capacity, but later learned it did not seem very "mature" for the students. I also didn't lay out in my mind the concept of the activity that well, and felt like I was not portraying the concept correctly at all when we were participating in it. While Mrs. Rice said I knew the content and seemed to do well, I still felt like I was really messing up - what was going wrong? Why could I not prepare for it well enough? What can I do better to get them all engaged? Well, there aren't really any clear answers to these questions... but I think my hard work and preparation for day 3 really paid off.

Day 3. I was awake until 2:30 AM to prepare for this day... while this doesn't seem that feasible in preparing for classes (x 6) in the spring, I know that the work put into this week will definitely help ease the load in the spring. The students were doing another activity Thursday (Project WILD rocks!) about a turkey population and limiting factors. It was pretty fun, and even included math, but they were more engaged and interested. I also didn't have as many problems with management because they were doing something and I was not trying to lead them in something. 

Overall, it was an excellent (but exhausting) experience. I definitely didn't know as much about TEACHING to real life kids as I thought. There is some credit I can give to State FFA Officer activities in ag classrooms, but looking back, I recall that those were mostly games and fun stuff. We didn't teach too much :) 

SO: concepts to take away for SUCCESS

~be prepared. really. know your stuff.

~set the stage by creating a felt need for the content. I am very bad at this. 

~don't second guess yourself, it will remove credibility and focus from the class session.

~keep directions clear/concise 

~ask high order questions and get them thinking

~teach for many years... then maybe you'll get it down
~remember - no matter how much you plan, it will never go the same as you expect it to in your head! So stay calm, be flexible, and have fun!