Being able to instruct our own mini lesson on participation day gave me a lot of insight on what the role of a teacher fully felt like. Instead of just helping students with their own work, Chris and I led a presentation on public speaking. While overall public speaking is an important trait to have, it directly impacted their current science project presentations. To begin, the powerpoint we presented took strategies from chapter 2 “Design and Plan” in order to grasp the attention of the class. This strategy consisted of connecting the project to popular culture and listening to responses. We gave an example of a person exhibiting good public speaking skills and one showing bad skills. By using President Obama’s image, it presented a familiar face that could gain more attention from the students. The goal of this slide was to allow students to note what they saw within the images. This reflection exercise proved the students already had a basic knowledge of good public speaking characteristics. The biggest takeaway that I got from the our presentation was, will students actually implement what they have learned? At the very end of the powerpoint, we chose two students to practice the five focal points given during the presentation. This practice included stating their name and two fun facts. Chris and I were looking for good posture, inflection, confidence, pace, and eye contact. I initially thought of this so students could fully grasp the information we delivered to them. This idea derived from chapter 7 “Engage and Coach” because it is important for teachers to focus on teaching moments. By allowing the students to give their own demonstration of what they learned, it allowed for the class to add corrections. I thought it was important for the class to comment on the volunteer’s performance not just us as teachers.

Moving from our participation session into planning our own learning activity, the concept I wanted to focus on was the usage of good public speaking. I think it is important to build off of the foundation Chris and I have already built. Moreover, there was a feeling within me that if the student didn’t practice the points we gave them, they wouldn’t adopt them. Because of this, we chose our two disciplinary domains to be English and Science. This also made sense because they were already giving presentations for their current science project, so it will only be beneficial to them. The next step in the process was to brainstorm ideas that would allow students to gain knowledge from a project-based learning assignment, but also enjoy what they were doing. Since the class was already learning about the different kingdoms, I thought it would be interesting to continue on one of them. Reflecting back to my sixth grade science class, I remember we did a project on insects and this fix within the animal kingdom. To ensure some authenticity from chapter 2 ‘Design and Plan” I wanted to make sure students conducted a good amount of research to add onto the English portion of the project. By allowing students to capture insects, research them, and present their findings, I think many educational areas will be covered