Microteaching+2+-+Helmsing

**October 11, 2011** **Introducing a Unit**
 * MICROTEACHING #2**

Using the unit plan for "Perspectives on the Civil War" from an 8th grade U.S. history class, design a "hook" (also called anticipatory set) for any lesson you can see growing out of the unit. Step 1: Outline a draft of a lesson you would teach in a 45 minute 8th grade U.S history course from the Civil War unit. Step 2: Focus on developing the "hook" (anticipatory set) for your lesson. This hook should be around 8-10 minutes in length (no fewer than 5 minutes long, but no more than 10 minutes). Step 3: You will teaching the hook for your lesson to your microteaching group. Step 4: You will have 4 minutes to provide feedback. During the three minute feedback time, the "teacher" who just taught the hook cannot speak, even to answer questions or respond to comments! Only the other five "students" can provide feedback as colleagues during this time. Teachers will then have only 1 minute (!) after the "Feedback Four" to respond to the comments. 15 minutes per microteaching (including hook, feedback, and response) x 6 students = 90 minutes

COMMENTS/FEEDBACK ABOUT THE MICROTEACHING: I thought this exercise was very helpful although I will say a bit enlightening as well. I think we as a class had a hard time understanding exactly what the hook was but after further discussion I think the hook doesn't necessarily need a name. In the end the hook emphasizes the importance of drawing your kids into the material before you actually start the material. This doesn't necessarily have to be done in the way that we did it in class but never the less it is an important skill to learn. Besides the hook I also learned a lot about my own teaching style or should I say lack of a teaching style. Prior to this microteaching I just assumed that I would know how to teach when the time came but I am realizing more and more that I have a lot to learn. This was a big step today. I learned that one of my major issues is translating what I write down on paper as a lesson to what I actually teach in the classroom. I write something down that I want to teach then when I get up in front of people I blank on what it is I wrote down. I need to come up with a way to bridge this gap between my written plan and how i think up in front of a classroom. One thought I have had is that I need to break away from how the structure of teaching tells us to think. Don't get me wrong I think the prestructured plans we have been following are useful but i don't know if my brain necessarily thinks in the way that it asks you to think. The next time I try to develope a lesson I think I am going to put more focus into making the lesson so I understand it rather than making to fit a prestructured model. Maybe this will translate better when I am actually teaching or maybe not. All I can say is that its worth a try. -Michael Perry

I think this exercise was frustrating 1) because I have no prior experience with hooks. I honestly don't remember teachers using them, especially with every lesson (I'm not sure if you're supposed to use one every lesson). Most times teachers just started the lesson, or it was a continuation of the previous day. and 2) because we had such little time to come up with one. I admit I'm not the most creative, so this exercise is good in that it pushes me to try to be creative, but it's also frustrating because I feel it could have been better if given more time. I think it would be helpful to have ideas from experienced teachers, not just on hooks, but on how the lesson looked after that. It's hard for me to picture the transition. I guess I just want to know if I'm crashing and burning or on the right track, and that's where the examples come in handy. - Steph C.

To be honest I was quite nervous as we started this activity. I didn't think the amount of time, about an hour and a half or so, was enough to adequately prepare a successful hook for the Civil War. Like Steph just said, I found it quite frustrating as well but regardless I think all of the examples that were presented in my group were really good. Given more time i think they could be quite effective in hooking kids into the topic. I tend to get nervous when my ideas aren't thought out as much as I'd like them to be but I think a major point in these activities is to increase confidence in ourselves and I would say I feel that way after this second micro teaching activity. My idea seemed really good in my head but when it was played out in reality it didn't go as well as I'd hoped. Despite that i still felt that the structure of the activity I chose was sound, I just think I needed more time to fully develop and refine my idea. I tend to feel a bit uncomfortable with these micro teaching things but as much as I don't like it, they are pushing me out of my comfort zone and I think they are really helping me grow as a teacher.

-Joel Taggart

I really enjoyed the microteaching from Wednesday’s class period. I thought this exercise of teaching a hook we created to our microteaching group was a great learning experience for me. Although, I did not present my lesson I created on Wednesday because we ran out of time from my observations of my peers in my group and during feedback periods I think we all benefited from this exercise. I learned a lot of different strategies and activities from my peers during the discussion period where we shared our hooks with each other that I could use in my own classroom. I really thought this was helpful that we shared our hooks because there were many activities that my peers did that I found to be very creative and effective for teaching that I don’t think I would have thought of doing. Also, although we didn’t have much time to plan our hook before teaching it to our group I think this was also was a helpful part of the lesson because many times when teaching we will have to change up our lesson plans and do something completely different than we had planned out, so by having little time to plan out our hook I think this helped us with getting experience on teaching something that we didn’t expect or have time to really prepare for. Like many others had stated with being frustrated with the exercise, I too also felt a little nervous or frustrated trying to come up with an activity for my hook however, I think that this frustration was a good thing and was more of a positive experience for me that has helped me grow and learn from for my future.

-Becki Farquhar

I thought this microteaching activity was very effective. I definitely appreciate the "hook" part of a lesson more because I feel I often overlooked it by thinking it was easy. This showed me that it is much tougher to sway a student body to want to listen to what you are talking about. In my "hook" I left too much time up to the students. This showed me that sometimes students will not want to participate or react to what you are saying. Like Becki said above, this activity showed us that we will have to change our lesson plans often due to the classroom. I also thought is was very effective for all of us to get a little more comfortable with our teacher stance. This is overlooked a lot and it was important that we focused on something that is not often seen in a teaching class due to lack of teaching. The feedback portion was very helpful especially since the subject could not express themselves. I think it is great to see what other people think without telling them why you did that hat way. It provides a great look into how you are delivering your message and if it works or not.

-Kam Bouchard

This second microteaching was mixed for me. At first, I was confused about what exactly a hook was and what it wasn't. When I was thinking of an idea, I got a grasp on what one could be, but wasn't confident in it. When my group and the class started sharing their ideas of their hooks, I got a better feel for what one could look like. After Mark cleared up that a hook is basically whatever you want it to be and there was no right or wrong ideas or a list of hooks anywhere, I felt a lot better. I thought that most of the class had a hard time making their hooks be at least 10 minutes. This is something that we will obviously have to work on, although it may take up more time in a classroom, it is something that we will need to plan and prepare before hand, so we do not just ask an introductory question and move to the lesson. On the other hand, this activity was a good learning experience for me. I did not share mine yet, but I found it helpful for others in my group to hear constructive criticism. For example, someone didn't know that their instructions were not clear at all during their hook and we felt confused and lost on what was going on. Once people let him know, he was thankful for the advice. I think its important to do this, because we don't see ourselves teaching and even though someone may have a creative idea on paper, they may not transition well in explaining or talking about it.

-Alexis LEpri

I thought this microteaching was very useful to my understanding of how teaching works. Using "hooks" is something that is new to me, because my teachers really used anything that I can clearly remember was a hook. I think that the biggest issue I had was with was getting to the time limit. While I made it to nine minutes, I think there is a lot of room for improvement. I definitely found it really interesting that everyone's hook was unique to themselves. I expected to see many similar ideas for how to do a hook, but instead received many more great ideas to how to write and use an hook in my classroom. As uncomfortable as it was to sit while your peers discussed you and your teaching style, I think it was really useful. This is because as a teacher and a professional we have to be able to take the criticisms that people have as constructive pieces of information instead of attacks on who you want to be as a teacher. I really liked being able to give the feedback to my peers, because we all have different ideas of what it means to deliver a hook and teach social studies, so it is a significant part of our growth as teachers to listen to competing perspectives. **__Creativity is the key!__**

- Zack VanSickle

This microteaching activity was probably the best thing that I've done so far in the teacher education program. Before this class I'd never even heard of a hook and in high school I don't remember teachers using this idea to start a lesson so coming up with ideas was incredibly difficult. The fact that this hook I'd never heard of had to last ten minutes made it even more difficult to figure out, especially in such a short time span. I'll admit it didn't help that I had four extra days to over plan this whole thing because I feel like I work best under pressure and having this much time to work on something like this was detrimental to my hook. The feedback was good because I got to get an idea of how some things may be misconstrued by others as well as the fact that I need to realize that kids in eighth grade may not be able to understand some of the more complex ideas I choose to discuss in class. I look forward to getting a better idea of time in front of a class as well as getting better at scrapping an idea that isn't working as well as I may have initially planned. -Andrew Thom

I thought that this was one of the most exciting and nerve wracking microteaching we have had thus far. When I observed the other people teach in my group, I felt confident that my lesson would be 10 minutes or at least close to it. From what I had planned, I thought it would develop discussion between the students which would eat up some of the time. When I started the lesson, I felt I got the ball rolling from the first minute. I was developing discussion with the students, but I couldn't develop discussion between the students themselves. With no discussion between the students, I began to lose momentum and slowly trail away from the lesson. My mind began to drift and I knew I was losing the attention of the students. I also felt that since I knew I had to reach a 10 minute goal, when I began to trail off, I began to just ramble on, whether I was repeating myself or just speaking nonsense. I need to develop that natural flow that teachers have that allow them to keep the conversation going without any hesitations. After the critiques, I was told that I need a better closer to my lesson, which I completely agreed with. Not developing a good closer or transition to end the lesson or led up to the next lesson really through me off my balance. It also made me realize that adaptation is crucial to teaching. My plan was to develop student discussion with other students. It back fired and I had nothing to fall back on, leaving me like a fish out of water. However, it was fun to test out how I would use a hook for lesson. It seemed that my fellow colleagues enjoyed my concept/metaphor which gives me a little confidence booster. This microteaching session got me excited for this weeks.

-Jason Schultz

I liked the idea of putting us in blind to a new situation because it stressed the importance of thinking and moving on our feet. Also, I feel like it was important for us to struggle through making it on our own for 10 full minutes. Every new and upcoming teacher has to get a feel for time management in our classrooms and I feel the only way to do that is to feel the awkwardness when you didn't plan for the lesson being that quick. One can never plan for everything that can happen in the classroom and rolling with the punches is a vital tool to learn. With that said, I would also like to see some more concrete hooks that we could use. I know a "hook" is not really a concrete term that exists but I just truly believe that giving us a few concrete workable ideas will help us with our ideas. Watching my groups hooks, I feel there were a lot of interesting topics to engage the students with, but some of that was lost in a lack of ability to engage, including myself.

-Thomas Ropek

I understand the need to be prepared and think ahead, but this type of mircroteaching definitely stressed me out. I know that was the idea but it made me think more along the lines of, I am not going to have adequate knowledge to be a teacher. It is helpful to prepare for the possibility that I will be thrown into a situation like this, but it is also very scary to me. I do enjoy seeing what everyone else comes up with because I think there are a lot of creative minds out there. Whenever I hear of someone else's idea it helps me build and spawn my own ideas for the future. Standing in front of our section awkwardly is important, because as a first year teacher I feel like that will happen often because you will not have a ready feeling of your students yet. I like the group work but sometimes all of the subjectiveness is frustrating because people always have different viewpoints on what is the correct and incorrect way to teach. Nonetheless I am learning from each experience that we have.

-Chrissy Gentry

To be honest, I found this to be very frustrating. However, it turned out to be quite enlightening as well. I didn't feel like I had enough time to prepare a good hook and I was very nervous to get up there. But, I now see why we did it; we can't be too serious and try to put hours of effort into these sorts of things. Odds are we are going to fail a lot when we begin teaching and if we put a ton of time into something we are going to be very disappointed when it doesn't go as we planned. I always thought of a hook as being very simple, but now I see that it is actually a pretty tough concept. It's hard to come up with an engaging hook and refrain from beginning to present the lesson content. I learned a lot from watching my peers and I think we had some good discussions. I also realized how long ten minutes was. The only thing I really didn't like was the way it was structured. I didn't like that we just had to sit there is we didn't go for ten minutes. I understand it was to get us to see how long it was, but not every hook in our classrooms will be ten minutes and if they end "early" we would just jump into the next part of the lesson, not sit and wait. I just found myself being more focused on how long i was going instead of just relaxing and doing it. -Rachel Beardsley

I really enjoyed this microteaching, but I found the timeframe to prepare for it to be somewhat stressful. An issue I ran into was that I excepted the students to know more about the leadership of the Confederacy than probably the average 8th grader would. My group's suggestions were really helpful, as they pointed out that I should do more of an introduction to my students, which might result in higher participation. I liked how the microteaching made me think on my feet when there was a lack of participation; I hope to be better prepared to do that in the future because of this experience. Like Chrissy, I liked watching the others teach because of the ideas that were shared that I could either use or further develop in my own classroom someday. Overall, I thought this microteaching was very helpful and I am excited for future microteachings! -Matt Snyder

The micro-teaching activity was tough for me because of the fact that I had no time between classes to come up with anything because of my other class. Just rolling with it was actually sort of fun however. Having to continually come up with hooks on my own is hard for me and I would like a bank of hooks to reference when I am having a hard time coming up with one. I did enjoy working on my teacher voice and stance too. -Peter Croce

 The micro-teaching activity was frustrating and tough since I felt very rushed into the activity. I didn't know exactly where to begin or how to start. The activity I did turned into a disaster as I didn't think through the many possibilities that could be derived from the activity. My group was very helpful in helping me realize that I had opened Pandora's box and walked into a dangerous situation. I tried to compare human slaves to items, which was taken as a very offensive thing from my group. I had achieved the frustration and the controversy that I wanted to reach, but failed to realize that it is very touchy subject and the activity became chaotic and uncontrollable, especially for someone with very little experience. It was very scary and frustrating, but in the end I liked this activity because it shows that a teacher must always be prepared and must always see all of the possibilities that could happen in a classroom. A teacher must think carefully through each lesson, see the different possibilities that could happen, and ensure a safe environment. I found this micro-teaching activity to be very helpful. --Regan Kwong