Teaching Reflection (FA13 Week 1-3)

Teaching

After the first three weeks of teaching in w200, I felt my classroom atmosphere has been getting so much better than the first week because I feel more comfortable to talk in the classroom and students are getting more involved in what we are doing in class. Also, some students gave me the feedback saying that they feel more comfortable in this class when we slow down a bit, cause they would know more about what they should do and how they can complete tasks. Therefore, I realized that most of the time, I would always need to talk about new concepts, new skills, and new requirements AGAIN and AGAIN until they started thinking I was funny and a little bit annoying by asking questions or telling them the same things so many times. Another strategy I used this week in class when I want to check whether students remember what I said or understand the new information, I would pretend I was one of their students to ask them questions and waiting for their answers. Some of them would give a summary of what they learned today or something like what different kinds of sources they could use if they encountered any problems. I think it's helpful for me and for my students to have some time wrap up the main points in the end of each class.

Activity

I'm really glad that I have opportunity to do the observation in Matt's class before I teach every week. One of my biggest concerns for my teaching is the time management in how much time to spend lecturing and letting students have discussion, hands-on activities, and the technology integration practice in class. Therefore, it helps a lot when I can roughly estimate how much time Matt spent on each part of a lesson and have an idea about what kinds of problems or issues that students might have for different activities. Additionally, when I observe Matt's class, I would come up with some other ideas that I would like to try in my class. For instance, using an interesting online timer while students were doing discussions and having students sign up for Spice Up activity for each week (we had Laffy Taffy and Jumping Jack for these two weeks) that they need to facilitate a 3-5 minutes activity when the class needs to be spiced up.