Reflections from Microteaching

It is crazy to think that we are this far into the semester already! So many great opportunities have been taking place in the past few weeks, and this week was no exception! This week, I had the opportunity to participate in a "microteaching" experience at State College Area High School. This experience consisted of 1 day of observing the class that we would be teaching and three days of actually teaching a mini unit that we designed. 

For this experience, I was teaching a Natural Resources class that was currently in a Forestry Unit, so I decided to teach timber measurements as this related closely to what the class was already learning. While I am not a forestry expert, this teaching experience was great way to stretch out of my comfort zone, teaching content that I am not 100% familiar with to a group of actual high school students. Throughout this blog post, I want to highlight some of my biggest takeaways from this experience. 

Always prepare for cold weather. 

Having lived in Pennsylvania my entire life, you think that I would understand how unpredictable the weather can be, however, I always seem to be way to optimistic. So, when I work up for my first day of microteaching and realized that it was much colder then I had planned, I had to pivot my lesson plan so that students were not spending as much of my lesson time outside. This also opened my mind to other factors that could play into a successful lesson. For example, what plans can I create to help alleviate issues if technology fails? As I move forward in my planning process, I hope to be more forward thinking about the factors that could affect my lessons. 

Build relationship with your students. 

It is hard to judge the "vibe" of a classroom when you don't really know the students that you are teaching. I think that having a better relationship with these students would have allowed me to truly gauge how well students are understanding the content I was teaching. Having these relationships with students would also help with classroom management. This would give me a better idea of who can work together, which students will need extra help with assignments, and overall just a better classroom environment. Through the experience, I have definitely gained a better understanding of how important it is to build relationships with students. 

Try new things!

One thing that always worries me when I am writing lesson plans is "what if this activity flops?" or "what if the students don't like this?". As I was writing my microteaching materials, I was having this same worry. However, I quickly decided that since I would only have these students for three days, this would be a great opportunities to try some of the things that I had considered doing in the spring. For example, during my microteaching, I had students create trifold and use each section of the trifold to draw what each type of timber harvesting method would look like. I was very surprised to see how well students responded to this activity, and really excited to see that many of them listed it as their favorite activity on their learner satisfaction survey. After seeing how well students responded to this activity, I will definitely have more confidence trying new things throughout my student teaching experience!