Tyler Kropelak EDUC 441 09/12/2014 ST Journal # 3 The third week of student teaching was possibly the most stressful week I’ve experienced during my entire college career. Not only have I have been working hard on the lessons I create and teach, but another element that upped my stress level was transitioning in to taking over my second class. Taking over my second class was a little more difficult than I originally expected because there are 31 students, a lot more than the 18 students in my first class. For the first couple of weeks I had very little interaction with them and did not have a good idea of the students’ personalities. This showed during my first lesson where I felt extremely tense and uptight. Furthermore, I could tell that …show more content…
This gave little room for student-teacher interaction or student participation. At the conclusion of the lesson I was less than thrilled with the class atmosphere because I could tell that I passed feelings of nervousness and tension onto the students. My biggest regret is that this tension was passed onto the students and they were not able to express themselves the way that they normally would have. Going forward over the next couple of weeks, the primary goal I have set for myself is to stay relaxed as possible when it comes to teaching. I believe that if I feel comfortable then the students will not be reluctant to participate during the lesson. When I tense up I am not myself and the class can immediately pick up on that. Therefore, the lesson plans I have spent countless hours preparing become less fluid and rougher as I am moving students from one thing to the next without a proper transition or flow. Another goal that I have set for myself for the following weeks is to focus more on the planning aspect of my …show more content…
From content material to how I am going to have students transition from activity to activity really needs to be planned out thoroughly for every lesson. I think that a few of my lessons really suffered from my lack of detail. For example, I would have hand out worksheet and I would not really explain what students were suppose too do with the worksheet and just expected the students to complete them. In the future I should include various opportunities for when a large group of students are struggling with content material or a specific activity by stopping them and possibly do the first problem as a whole class. This technique would be a lot more efficient instead of the teacher going from group to group and individually explaining it four or five times. The best way for me to measure the effectiveness and structure of my lesson plans is to go back through with my cooperating teacher and look at ways I could improve my lessons and make changes for the next day. After spending time revising and modifying my lesson plans they go a lot smoother than the first one I ran with the original. I think that it had a large part with me going back and looking at the areas I thought the lesson had struggled the most and either added additional points of instruction or took out parts that did not work as