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On Tuesday, November 15th, myself and a group of my peers visited a 5th-grade classroom to teach a brief lesson that directly engaged with the project they have been working on in the long term. We collaborated to produce a lesson that would help prepare them to create a ‘podcast’ project that was soon to be finished by the class. In our lesson, we ensured that they understood the basics of proper public speaking and provided them with tips on how to speak and sound strong in their delivery. My role in this lesson was to deliver a ‘model’ podcast with my partner while our other two peers provided the more empirical portion of the lesson. In our model, we not only showed the students what a good example of public speaking looked like but also what the common mistakes looked like and how to avoid them. Experiencing teaching a lesson to a live audience of learners was very revealing of how to form my own lesson plans. I found that the students reacted positively to humor and it helped keep them engaged. Additionally, providing examples of what not to do seemed to also be very beneficial.
Some ideas we picked up from our preparatory reading come from the chapters of our Boss reading. In this reading, we learned about assessing prior knowledge and ensuring that all students had a good understanding of what they have been learning. We incorporated this idea by making sure students knew all the steps to create their podcast. We tried to achieve this while also teaching them what a good podcast looks like, in consequence, it acted with double effectiveness. We also tried to incorporate the idea of questioning the students to make sure they had an understanding of what had been taught. We tried to do this by allowing them to ask questions, however, there was a lack of student questions and we were not able to fully incorporate this into our project.
In connection to my own Lit Inquiry, I learned a lot of valuable lessons from this experience. Foremost, I learned that showing students ‘bad examples’ is a very effective tool to help ensure they are on the right path. It shows them what to avoid and emphasizes what a good example is. Additionally, it also allows them to recognize any mistakes they might make in the drafting progress. Another connection I made is the importance of incorporating humor into a lesson. This helps keep the audience engaged, especially younger students. I am excited to move forward from this teaching experience and incorporate what I learned into future lessons.
Picture Credits: See subtext
Noah, I really appreciated hearing about your experience, especially because I was able to witness the benefit of your team’s planning and delivery of the think aloud. Offering the “what not to dos” in a humorous way takes the pressure off and reminds them that everyone is learning together! EL- collaboration
It’s important to note where having more time to respond might be taken- perhaps they were just a bit wowed by your presence and weren’t sure what to ask about in the moments after. Did you find that you were able to fill in some of those gaps during the one-on -one?
For instance, I found that my students were overwhelmed by all of their research brainstorms and notes. Yet, when prompted with a question about where to begin, what their first line should be?, they seemed clear on the genre in terms of welcoming audiences and hooking their audience into the topic at hand. Mrs. Cosgriff noted to me that sometimes, SOLS get in the way (the diagram helps them practice main idea, but this standard doesn’t always guide transition to articulating that in a podcast narrative, since there are considerations of audience and tone (welcome, prior knowledge to new knowledge, satire, etc.)