My second day of teaching went quite a bit better than the first. I managed to address quite a few of the points my colleague teacher raised yesterday as well as improving my structure and delivery. Where yesterday the way I presented the examples and instructions wasn't as effective as it should have been introducing a new unit of work (I think that I was still stuck in 'university seminar' mode rather than 'high-school lesson' mode), I think that the main thing lacking today was the polish that will come with experience. One reflection of this is that the comments provided by my colleague teacher amount to one-and-a-bit pages today rather than the three pages of notes on yesterday's lessons.
The most glaring omissions yesterday were:
- my lack of action toward learning the students names;
- my poor use of the whiteboard to reinforce and record explanations; and
- the structure of the lesson.
I started addressing the first two points more adequately today, but I need to pay more attention to the third. One way this came out was in my use of examples. As my colleague teacher pointed out to me, we should use examples and explanations to 'scaffold' the students understanding: we explain a concept; they practice it; we extend the concept; they practice this extension... Today, I explained a concept (deriving the length of one side of a right triangle given the length of the other two sides), and then asked them to do some problems about concept that is not related (or, rather, not related in a way immediately obvious to high-school students). This resulted in a bit of confusion which I needed to resolve by explaining in a lot more detail.
Tomorrow, I'll try to focus on my structure ('scaffolding' is the key word here) and learning the students' names.
Tags: Education Teaching Practicum
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