My Micro-teaching Experience: Reflection

     Last week, I had the opportunity to do my micro-teaching experience for AEE 412 at Bellwood Antis High School in Bellwood, PA. The program is led by Mr. Matt Webreck, who agreed to allow me to come into his classroom for three days to teach some lessons. The class that I got to teach was his 1st-period Ag Science 1 course. This class was a group of 30 freshman students that could not all fit into the ag classroom. Therefore, they have to use the cafeteria as their learning space, which can pose its own challenges. 

    The unit that I got to teach out of was an FFA unit, and I got to focus specifically on CDEs and LDEs. These are events that FFA members get the opportunity to compete in, and can ultimately go all the way to the national level while competing in these contests. I started the first day of my teaching with some basic lectures on what CDE/LDEs are and gave some examples for students to reference. Then they got to do a sorting activity in which they had to distinguish between CDEs and LDEs based on how the competitions worked. Then the next two days were spent laying out expectations for a poster project that they would complete. After doing a heat mapping activity with 30 freshmen (GULP), based on that inventory the students were put into groups and were assigned a CDE/LDE to research and make a poster on. Then, toward the end of the third day, the groups each got to present their findings to the class. 

    Overall, this went pretty well given the circumstances. I will say that the cafeteria presented a challenge, as it was hard to constantly make my presence felt throughout such a large classroom space. A few times I had to redirect students' attention in order to make sure they were respecting their classmates as they presented. Mr. Webreck was very helpful in making copies of my handouts and materials which made things go much smoother as well. Overall, this experience was super cool and it was a great first experience for teaching high school students. This just got me even more excited for my student teaching placement at Central Columbia come March!

Comments

  1. AGmazing GraceNovember 20, 2022 at 3:54 PM

    Wow, 30 students is a lot! I had 23 students micro-teaching and at some points I thought that I might lose my mind while we were doing highly engaging activities! I would love to hear more about some management practices that you used with large of a group!

    ReplyDelete

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