S.H.+Journal+6

Scott Higgins Journal 6 Reflection on Overall Experience 11.30.11 I feel this field experience was a good experience for me. I really enjoyed the first week getting to know the students and learning how Ms. Hinz sets her class up. I thought she did a really nice job of communicating to the students what she expects out of them and I thought the students really responded well to that. I think this was very obvious because in the three weeks that I was there I did not see any behavior problems. This really helped me because coming in to a classroom and I did not have to worry about behavior issues and I could focus on what I was doing. The first week I was there we were playing handball and because I was not familiar with that game it gave me a chance to learn more about it and how to play it. Hopefully I can use the skills that I learned for that game in the future when I am teaching my own students. The second two weeks for me were more difficult than I thought coming into the field experience. This is when we started on the CPR/Rescue Breathing unit and I was not comfortable with that at first. Because I would be helping with co-teaching this unit on three different lessons I had to learn all of the information and steps before I could teach it. I have CPR certified for a long time but I have never had to teach the steps and I actually have not had any CPR training at in over a year so that unit was difficult for me. I felt like I had to spend more time learning the information so that I could teach it to the students than I did actually trying to figure out how to teach the lesson. At times in this lesson I felt that I was not much further ahead of the students in learning the skills. However, I did become more and more comfortable teaching the unit the more I taught. Teaching this unit with Ms. Hinz was very helpful because she was able to help me out when I got stuck and was not sure what to do. She gave me some ideas on how to ask the students questions as I tried to find my place on what I was teaching. I think that it was important for me to realize that this unit was probably more to teach correctly than any other unit because of the affect it can have on a person’s life and I really tried to convey that to the students. Most of the assessments that used were observation and question/answer sessions to individual or small groups. I think this was worked best for this unit because the students needed as much time as possible to practice their skills before they were able to take/pass their skills tests. All of the students seemed to like this assessment style because it gave them the opportunity to ask questions as they were practicing. Some of the things that I could have done better is teaching from the lesson plans that I had written up. I think I did a good job of sticking to the schedule of events on the lesson plans but there were time that I do not think I put enough emphasize on the goals and objectives that I was trying to teach toward. Ms. Hinz made a good point that just being able to write a good lesson plan does not matter if a teacher does not understand how to get the information across to the student, I thought that was very good advice and gave me something to think about in writing/teaching a lesson that I may not be real familiar with the information. Overall I really did learn a lot from this experience that I think will help me moving forward. One of the biggest things that I learned is that preparing and being ready for the class/lesson is just as important as teaching the class itself, especially if you are teaching content that you may not be familiar with (like CPR for me). Secondly, I learned how important communication is with peers. I think that I did not communicate as well as I should have in the beginning with Ms. Hinz but I think I did get better at that by the end of my time at West and we were on the same page before I left.