Thursday, December 3, 2009

Vancouver or Bust




On Wednesday my final teaching experience went better than great. The reason I feel this was is because I had so much fun doing it. Skating around with music playing and the rest of my classmates was really fun. Although in my time coding sheet I did not receive the best score I was very close to all the required percentages so I was not that upset. The thing that really took a lot of time was class management. The reason for this is because there were some students who skated faster than others and also while I was giving instructions a few times students fell which caused a lot of attention and I also had to make sure the students were alright after they fell. It was very interesting looking at the sheet seeing how many different things I was doing in the lesson.
My favorite part of my lesson was the hook that I used. I am an avid fan of the Olympics and the minute I found out I had skating I had to put and Olympic twist on it, especially with one coming up this February. Also it was fun using professor Xavier Waddles Phd. to help me to teach. Jack helped me think of that scaffolding idea and it worked out perfectly. He will probably be used again sometime in the future.
My C9 score really gave me a boost. I really try not to base my lesson on the sheet because I just want to make the lesson flow and not really stress over hitting certain points. I did miss check for understanding but I did get one bonus point so I got a 20/20
I was very happy with how I gave my feedback. According to my feedback analysis sheet I said something at least once to everyone in the class. I had a feeling that I would be able to give a lot of feedback going into the lesson due to the setup of the students. I had them skating widths of the ice and I would just go down the line and talk to each student. Also I really try to work on staying away from words like "good". In my previous lessons I had used that excessively so I really focused on giving specific feedback. Although I did notice that I gave more specific feedback to the people who looked like they were having trouble, for example Jed who was excellent on the Ice got 3 congruent tallies and 1 specific tally. Martino, who was having a little more trouble, received 3 specific tallies and 1 congruent tally.
In terms of paper work I really tried to make my lesson plan better for Lab D. I had a pretty good feel of what I needed to do to improve so I think it went better this time around. I did make a cue change in the middle of the lesson. I added the arm cue in the middle because I noticed the students looked good with the true skating technique and I feel I needed to add another cue or it would have been to repetitive.
One thing that was wrong but not necessarily a big deal in my lesson was the last two activities. In terms of progressions I really should have put the free skate around the ice last and the train activity before it. The reason why I did this is because I wanted to end on what I felt was most fun for the activity and the train activity was definitely more fun for the students. Another problem that I really need to improve is the use of the word "guys". I say it way to much and I need to focus on saying class. I did happen to catch myself once but it is still a problem that needs to be worked on.

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