AHA Moments

AHA Moments:

While observing a geography teacher, I realized the importance of two things:
1. It is SO important to keep all students engaged in the classroom. Having one student come to the board to quiz him/her is not efficient unless the other students can be involved in some way.

2. Don't put students on the spot. Students should be comfortable in front of you as the teacher and the class. If a proper community is not built, discussions will not be as effective because students will not feel open to share in front of the class.

3. Through teaching students, I realized that teachers should ALWAYS have a back-up or two for lesson plans. My group and I planned to use technology in our lesson, but the students' netbooks did not work well with the website. We ended up winging it and discussing the same thing the website would have done, but we did not get the depth that we were hoping for because it was not prepared for.

4. I also learned that sometimes students don't want to participate, but as teachers (even though we want to inspire them, and make them want to participate) sometimes we have to tell them that they will participate because that's how our classroom works. I had to tell my student that it's not fair for her group mates to pick up her slack, so she needed to pull her weight and participate as well. She wasn't enthused, but she participated.

5. Students are never too old to be read to.

6. Discussion Roles can sometimes hinder discussions for classes that do a good job freely discussing. Not all strategies work on all classrooms. Teachers have to test strategies that they feel will help their students.

7. Students like when math is taught via games. An example my student gave was to have students sit in their seats, give them a problem to solve, and have multiple answers on the board with a fly swatter. The first student to swat the answer wins that round. It can be played in teams or as individuals. It's a good way to assess students on skills besides math.

8. Through an observation, I learned the importance to teach more than one topic at once, especially when students are in the class for long periods of time. Some topics are dry, and hard to get students up and moving. By teaching more than one topic, the teacher can switch it up and get the students moving so they are not sitting for the whole time. This also allows the information to sink in for the students. Sometimes they are overwhelmed with so much information at once, so taking a break to discuss something else can be helpful.