I would like to do my reflection in two parts, a) on our lesson plan; and b) on my personal performance in delivering the lesson.
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I would like to stress that I learned a lot from my peers in putting together a lesson plan, and I really like our lesson plan (which regrettably I wasn't contributing much to; it was my group members who came up with those ideas and activities). And you may check out what a simple lesson plan I was producing for my non-curricular micro-teaching, which make a good contrast with what we made for this group project.
So before we deliver the lesson, I was super excited about our lesson plan, and no surprise that once we realise the plan in a classroom, things didn't felt as perfect as I expected to be.
One limitation I found is in assessing and providing feedback. Since it's a Math 8 class, I won't be having student doing a lot of homework/individual work. But I should have accurate knowledge about where they're at as a teacher. Then I believe in-class activity time would be crucial for me to assess and provide feedback. In the micro-teaching we did on Wednesday, we (me, Damanjit and Shannon) were all circling around the room and check-in with students during activities, and that's one thing I really liked about our lesson plan. But imagine in a regular Math 8 classroom, a 80 min lesson, although I would be able to allocate more time to the activities, there will be more students in the room, and I could hardly help and assess every student in the room.
Another notable unexpected happened is the confusion between volume and area. The confusion arose from the water demo we played in the lesson, which we were intending to derive the Pythagorean theorem from. This confusion is was also mentioned in the feedback we received. If this arose in a 80 min lesson, I think I would facilitate the students to think/discuss about it. But for our 15 min lesson, we didn't have enough time to resolve this confusion completely.
From the feedback provided by our peers, one of them was suggesting providing motivation behind learning Pythagorean Theorem. And this is an advise that I am not sure if I agree with. I would suppose that the motivation would be to find the missing side in a right angle triangle, but what percent of our student would be motivated by that? I feel like it is more natural, that we first derive the theorem from observations, and then talk about the implications of the theorem. I would like to know what other people think about this.
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In terms of my performance as a teacher/speaker, there's a specific thing I'm feeling regretful from my performance on Wednesday - I couldn't wrap up the lesson nicely. I was giving the last part of the lesson, and when I knew that is almost time, I asked for any final question (which was nice), but after that I was kind of frozen. We have planned for further contents and activity (including stating the algebraic form of the theorem), and I had the chance to signposting, saying for example "we will be doing ____ and ____ in our next class."
Moreover, I really want to work on my teachers' voice and confidence. I want to be a good speaker. I might want to start with practicing a loud and clear voice.
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Here are the forms we collected. I am sorry that I didn't complete the form for my group. I didn't forget about it but just struggled with it. I hope what I wrote above is adequate for cover up for that.
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