No Experience Necessary

When you think of jobs that state no experience necessary, what do you think of? Maybe someone working at a grocery store or a restaurant, a place where the skills you will need can be easily acquired through on the job training. Teaching is not a job that I typically think of falling into this category, but for our first lab in AEE 412 thats was exactly what happened.

Heres how it went, we showed up to class on Monday morning, picked a lesson at random from an envelope and then Wednesday we were expected to come to lab ready to teach our fellow classmates about our random topic.

WOW back up, we haven't learned how to write objects, or how to write a lesson plan, or well anything about how to be a great teacher, it was precisely a no
experience required experience.

Anyway, there were some pretty awesome topics in that envelope including butterfly origami and one about tiki gods. Then there was mine, the mottos of the countries of Central America, my first thought was, boring!

Then I kicked myself in the butt, because I believe that there is no boring content just boring ways of presetting material and boring teachers.

I knew that there would be a lot to cover in 15 minutes so my main goal I decided was to provide some strategies for memorization and make some personal connections to further the learning, not ideal, but it would have to do to meet my predetermined objectives.

Judgment day came, I had my copies, I  had on my teacher attire , I had my clicker, my awesome Teach Ag! Flash Drive and I was ready to go...

When it was all said and done I walked away with two thoughts that day, one, man 15 minutes sure does fly by, and two, ok not great, but I didn't fall flat on my face and my learners did pretty well on the assessment.

The part of my lesson that I was most excited with would be the two connections I made during it, while they weren't the main points they provided ties back to the FFA organization and to the content area of social studies. 

After reviewing my video and reflecting on my teaching further, I have several more thoughts.

An area of difficulty I encountered was knowing when my students were done with a task. Looking back on it, I should have incorporated more detail into my directions, including an indicator for them to signal when they completed a task. 

I also noticed that I did not use signaling words to indicate when I wanted students to stop listening to me and begin the task at hand.

In addition, I had more content than my learners could take take in, in 15 minutes, which caused the synthesizing of the mottos to be very rushed at the end. If I had been designing the objectives and the tasks to be completed for this content with no stipulations, I would have taken an entire class period to learn the locations and mottos, possibly two, depending on the depth of understanding I decided to
 achieve.

Overall, after watching the video and reflecting on my teaching, I can say that I saw the beginnings of a teacher, and I am sure there are items missing that I don't even know about yet, but I am excited to go up from here.