My First Lesson Plan Reflection

My First Lesson Plan Reflection

After teaching my first lesson plan, I was required to write a reflection about my first teaching experience.

Here are the directions for the reflection by my professor:

One day after you complete your teaching, you must write a reflection on the experience. This reflection must include assessment of your preparation for teaching the strategy, analysis of your teaching, and suggestions for ways to improve. Post this to Moodle by the second day after you teach.

Here is my reflection of teaching my first lesson plan:

My Teaching Strategy Experience Reflection

I was really surprised by the feeling of using a lesson plan and how teaching the class felt. I was delighted to find out that it was actually kind of fun. And surprisingly I wasn’t even that nervous. But I do have to admit that preparing for the lesson plan was sort of a disaster for me. Since it was midterms week and since I had a lot of homework, projects, and midterms due in the beginning of the week, I kind of procrastinated and left preparing for the lesson plan last minute.

 So there I was, the day before, scrambling to put my lesson plan together. I spent all day figuring out the order, organizing, making copies, and preparing for my lesson plan. I had so much due on Wednesday and I wanted to get as much as my other homework done as possible too, so I was up until 2 am in the morning finishing up the rest of my homework. Let’s just say Tuesday night and Wednesday was pretty rough. It’s actually pretty ironic that this happened because part of my lesson was about procrastinating and stressing out. And there I was, a perfect example of what not to do during midterm week. I wonder if anyone even noticed. I’m pretty sure no one else noticed, but I sure did. I was so tired. 

            Anyway, overall, I would say that me teaching the lesson went pretty well. Better than I expected and thought it was going to go anyway. I was very proud of myself and how I did, especially for teaching a lesson for the first time, not to mention I was up until two in the morning. I felt pretty prepared and organized. At the time I also felt like I knew what I was doing because I was so prepared and organized. One thing that I knew going in that I was worried about, was time because I had so much I wanted to teach and do, but only half an hour to teach it. The previous night I did time my activities and kept on trying to shorten my lesson plan and did cut out a few things, but wasn’t sure what else to cut out. Not to mention I never ran all the way through or practiced going through my whole lesson plan either. I practiced parts of it, but not all of it in order, all the way through.

I went in on Wednesday with actually 60 minutes worth of things to talk about and do in my lesson plan. So, when I had downtime, when the students were working and I wasn’t walking around listening to what they were saying, I was trying to figure out what else I could cut out or skip. Knowing that I had more than enough planned, I tried to talk at a faster pace and kept careful watch of the time, on my watch, since there wasn’t a clock up on the wall (because it had been taken down). At one point I noticed I skipped an important part (which was also my favorite part may I add) where I was going to ask the class more specific questions about procrastination to get them thinking about possible questions to ask for the Author Says/I Say Chart, though I did bring it up later on in the lesson plan. In the end, I somehow ended my lesson after about 40 minutes. I’m not exactly sure where the extra twenty minutes went, but it worked out pretty well.

There are a couple of things I could have done better and improve on. First of all not waiting last minute and staying up really late the previous night was not a smart idea. Along with that, I probably could have picked a better article for the Say Something Read-Aloud Partner Activity, so the students would have more meaningful things to talk about and branch out from.

During my lesson plan I had a weird PowerPoint malfunction where one of my most important slides, explaining how to do the Say Something Read-Aloud Activity disappeared, but I felt like I recovered and explained it pretty well on my own, without it anyway. Even though explaining it without the slide worked, if I would have gone through my slideshow and practiced before hand, I probably would have caught it before hand and it probably would have ran more smoothly. Teaching-wise I could have probably been louder, more confident, and planned it out better so I could take my time. I also could have had better eye contact to connect to my students better, especially during the PowerPoint slideshow. I should have cut more things out and had the lesson planned out and timed closer to 30 minutes ahead of time. Another thing that would have helped to smooth out the bumps was going through it and practicing by myself and possibly with someone else, so they could give me some tips or suggestions. When it’s all said and done, I felt like I did pretty well and it was a great learning experience.