Field Experience Lesson Reflection

Like Kendra, I just realized that I have to post a comment to my lesson for my field experience. Unfortunately, i dont have a creative title! While I have basically leading the class the past two weeks with the reading of To Kill a Mockingbird and their summary journals and discussion questions, last Friday was my actual evaluation lesson. It wasn’t a lesson that I created since we are already behind, but I was able to put a twist on it. The activity was called Mapping Maycomb and it was really neat. The students had to do some research in the book using their close-reading skills to find the 10 most common places in the book so that they could create a map of Maycomb County, the setting for the novel. We were able to get through the first part of the activity and I am going back tomorrow morning to do the drawing part. Friday was originally supposed to be my last day, but I want to finish this activity with the kids.

The lesson actually went over very well. I didn’t get anything thrown at me and my kids were surprisingly well-behaved. Dr. Franklin couldn’t believe this was the class that I had been talking about all semester! I completed the lesson for my first block class and it didn’t go over nearly as well as it did for my third block. I had a lot more rejection, but they still got the work done. In third block, my students were wonderful. They discussed as a class and with their partners and really got involved in the activity. Then, as a class, we went through the page numbers and descriptions of the places so that they had all the information to begin drawing tomorrow. All of the sudden the bell rang and they were off. I was able to keep the students engaged the entire time and this really surprised me.

The only downfall in my lesson was trying to get some of the students to work. While most of them worked well with their partners to get the work done, some of the students waited until we went over the information as a class and just “hitchhiked” the answers. This made me a little angry, but I didn’t exactly know how to fix it. It was only fair to give the answers to the students that were working the whole time, but didn’t have time to complete it, but then those “hitchhikers” just got the work given to them. Other than that, I thought that the rest of my lesson flowed well. I incorporated a PowerPoint, writing on the dry erase board, group work, partner work, discussion, and candy into one lesson…I think it was a success!

Overall, I feel like I did well with my lesson. I expected the worst, but it came out positive. My experience in this classroom has taught me so much about the diversity in a classroom and I am really appreciative of it. I went into my practicum thinking about how terrible it was going to be…and it was for the first couple weeks, but I eventually gained respect from my students and now I am having a hard time leaving. One of my students even told me they were going to miss me! I put that in my Sunshine Box!!