Video+Critique+Analysis+EMTI

I truly enjoyed this experience of teaching a seventh grade geography class. It has given me a renewed passion for teaching and I am so excited to begin. I have found that videotaping my lesson shows things I need to work on and things that I do well. At the beginning of the lesson Alex and I stated what our lesson was going to be but we did not tell the students what the outcomes would be. I think it would make our lesson flow and easier to write if we explained to the students what we expected them to know and be able to do by the end of the lesson. We know the students learned what we had planned because of our assessment through two activities at the end of the class. We also used a formative assessment to ask the students whether or not they understood the concepts we were teaching. After watching the video, I now know how few of the students participated in the Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down procedure. This is something we could work towards developing and improving the method. The economic unit was put together by our cooperating teacher and other teachers at Dakota Meadows Middle School. This way we knew that the lesson we were teaching met standards of the school and Minnesota. Each of the lessons was included in the economics unit but there were no specific sequential order.

For this Needs vs. Wants lesson, our cooperating teacher provided the activity and guidelines to follow. My co-teacher and I brought in our own materials to use for the activity. We used these materials as a part of our lesson to ask students whether or not they were a need or a want. If any student disagreed they needed to explain why. This was not a hard lesson to prepare materials for because my co-teacher and I discussed it before class and brought them in the day we needed them. There were some disagreements but these materials helped the students understand that most of the things they have are wants, not needs to help them survive.

To assess the students during the lesson we used Thumbs up, Thumbs down. This can be an effective way to see whether or not the students understand what we are teaching them but all of the students need to participate in order for us to fully know if we should move on. I believe there are more effective ways to formatively assess students and they should be considered if I teach this lesson again. For our summative assessment, we asked the students to give up a want they had and write a reflection paper on the aspect of needs vs. wants and how they felt giving up their item. This assessment helped us know if they fully understood the difference between a need and a want and also to help them realize they will survive without their cell phones, mp3 players, video games, etc.

As a guest in the classroom my students treated me with respect. Middle school students do have a lot of energy so I needed to ask them to be more respectful at time but most of them did not act out. I was nervous at first but once I got past the first lesson it was much easier to involve students and ask for respect. I realized through watching the video, I need to expect more of the students but my cooperating teacher told me that knowing when to discipline comes with time and knowing the students. This particular classroom was tight on space so the desks were in three rows of eight and one row of 5 making it quite crowded. I realize that in some classrooms, only certain seating arrangements will work. Ms. Stow utilized a boy, girl, boy, girl seating arrangement to prevent chatter. I am not a big fan of the straight line set up but I know that I will have to make adjustments in my future classroom.

I think this was a very good starting point to learn to be a great and effective teacher. I would really like to learn how to differentiate lessons as to help students at all learning levels. I know our lessons were effective because if we referenced them in a later lesson, the students could answer questions and provide examples from previous lessons. I know I need to work on discipline and also expecting all students to participate and that is something I plan on utilizing from this videotape.