Reflection on Microteaching Exercise
NOTE: After reading everyone else’s responses, I feel like
maybe I did this wrong; I ended up writing a sort of reflection paper, and it’s
quite long and formal-sounding. In
retrospect, I wish I’d written less and talked more about how I felt teaching
rather than what I felt about the effectiveness of my lesson and the
microteaching exercise as a whole.
Whoops! I apologize in advance
for the lengthy read.
When planning the microteaching exercise, I did my best to
include variety in the lesson plan so that students who learn best in different
ways might have their needs met and so that the short story could be approached
in more than one way. I’ve always been a
fan of discussion-based classes, but I think that might simply be because they
work very well for me, personally, and because I enjoy interacting in that
format. I tried to set up the lesson in
such a way that students who didn’t necessarily enjoy or learn from that style
as much would have some other way of getting something out of the story. The lesson plan goes from individual silent
reflection to individual open reflection to a group “project” of sorts to
finally end with a full-class discussion.
My thought was that this would help students “ramp up” to a discussion
by letting them think of and develop ideas alone and in small groups together
before bringing them up to everyone (and potentially having to argue over them
with their classmates). It would also
emphasize the existence and importance of multiple interpretations and readings
of a text; starting out with a discussion might have led some students not to
bring up their interpretations in the face of a majority opinion or a
particularly well-constructed or forcefully-argued reading from one or two
particular students. Allowing students
to quietly reflect and then requiring them to share aloud before putting them
into small groups just seemed like the best way to alter the traditional
discussion format without completely changing the way it worked.
Obviously, I didn’t get to demo my entire lesson to the
class, but I think that what I did go through went rather well, if the class’s
response and my impression of my own teaching are anything to go by. In general, everyone in the class had
appreciative things to say about the class structure, the introductory
activity, and the perspective activity that I had them start on before time ran
out. People (including myself) seemed
particularly happy with the small group activity on perspective; I honestly did
not think that that section of the lesson would have been the most popular or
the most effective part, but it seemed like everyone was very much on-board
with the concept of it and my execution of it (i.e. walking around to different
groups, checking in with them, asking leading questions, etc.). In my mind, the really important parts of the
lesson were the first part (individual analysis) and the last part (full-class
discussion), and the middle activity was as much a transition as it was about
demonstrating the importance of perspective.
I think, in the future, that I will streamline that activity by making
sure to assign characters who would have particularly varied perspectives on
the events of the story to emphasize the point of the exercise rather than make
it seem like I’m arbitrarily assigning characters for people to write through
in order to take up time. It also seems
like people readily understood that the activity was meant as something of a
preface to the character-based reading journal that I would assign next to
accompany As I Lay Dying; I’m glad that came across with little explanation.
I also got the impression that everyone was happy with the
initial analysis and sharing activity. I
feel like I could have made it a bit more organized, either by literally having
everyone in a circle and just sticking to the order that people are sitting in,
or by being a bit more focused with my groupings of responses. I’m glad that people got a lot out of it, but
I think it needs some tweaking in order to make it seem more cohesive and
connected to the remainder of the lesson.
I do, however, really like the nonspecific nature of the assignment; I
had no idea I would get such varied responses, and when I was brainstorming
what the potential responses might be, I put down several that no one ever
brought up and missed several that quite a few people brought up (e.g. Miss
Emily’s house itself). The danger in the
exercise is if I (or any other teacher using the lesson) am not prepared to
talk about any and every aspect of the story, the class could get derailed by
unanticipated student responses or those students might have their responses
ignored or brushed over, which is both ineffective and insulting after they’ve
done all that work. Ultimately, I’m impressed
with how much this first portion of the lesson got people to think and how
varied their responses were, and I think that that unexpected variety of
responses meant that I wasn’t as prepared to facilitate it as I’d thought. In the future, I’m not sure I’ll change much
about it, but I will definitely spend more time working through the material
just in case a student gives me something I’ve never heard before.
As far as the teaching exercise as a whole goes, I think it
was definitely a worthwhile thing to do, from both a planning and an execution
standpoint. I’ve never had to write so
much about my own lesson plans before or really justify them to anyone but
myself, so I think all of these written responses are quite valuable just for
them forcing me to think about my own thinking.
And with execution, it’s always better to have a trial run, so to speak,
than to go into a classroom cold and just expect things to work with high
schoolers or even undergraduates. That
being said, I do wish I could have gotten more feedback in terms of
critique. I understand the reasoning
behind restricting comments to, “I think . . .” or, “I found that . . .” but I
personally would have liked to hear more of what people struggled with or
thought didn’t work. I know that
students were encouraged to talk about things they didn’t understand or times
when they weren’t sure what to do, but I don’t think there was a single comment
like that amongst any of the responses to any of the teaching presentations. I guess that speaks as much to our hesitance
as students as it does to the format of the class responses, but I do think we
all got the impression that there would be no critique unless it was to talk
about why particular things worked well.
I find myself constantly going back to my training as a Princeton Review
instructor, but I think it’s relevant here: one of the most iconic and
effective aspects of training was that our evaluations were given aloud
immediately after each one of our teaching presentations by the trainer. Everything was covered, including mistakes,
flubs, points where we went completely off-track, etc., and I think that
approach helped me improve quite a bit as a teacher. I wanted just a little bit of that here, some
suggestions for improvement, because I’m still not sure if anyone thought any
particular thing that I did just flat-out didn’t work.
Ultimately, I am quite happy with how my teaching
presentation worked out. I think that it
demonstrated the effectiveness in practice of what I had intended to do in
theory when I wrote the lesson plan up in the first place, combining elements
of different teaching approaches into a straightforward, cohesive lesson. I think simplifying and focusing Blau’s
“pointing” exercise for the opening comments was a good idea, and I’ll probably
end up doing that for most any literature lesson I teach. I also like that, as far as I can tell, the
full-class discussion of a text can remain intact in combination with other
kinds of analytical activities; I really would hate to lose that in the wake of
newer styles of presenting the material.
I’m glad that people got enough out of my lesson that they feel the
desire to use parts of it (e.g. the character-focused small group activity),
and even more glad that other people’s presentations had elements that I’d like
to adapt to my own lessons.
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