Becoming a Teacher for the Week

Welcome back friends! Long time, no see. I have been extremely busy with all of my classes and school work -- specifically teaching at Bishop Dunn. However, my fieldwork experience with Group 1 has finally come to an end and I'm here to talk about it! It went by extremely fast and I wish I could have taught for longer. My group and I were responsible for teaching the 4th graders about Westward Expansion and why people moved west. We had the luxury of teaching 3 lessons in total; a direct lesson, an inquiry lesson and a cooperative lesson.

Lesson 1

Lesson 2

Lesson 3

 I am very happy that my group and I got to teach all 3 lessons because the rest of the groups were not able to do that. It allowed me to fully understand and develop all of the different ways of teaching. From this experience, I learned a lot of new information about not only myself, but also students/their learning, planning/teaching and social studies learning/how to teach it. Below, I am going to explain my personal reflection on teaching all that I learned! :)

•  What I learned about myself: I am very much of a planner and if I could I would write down everything I am going to say and going to get through each lesson, but I very quickly learned that this is not possible. I learned that I need to go with the flow a little bit more because things will not always go as planned. I also learned that I need to be more confident in my teaching abilities.
• 4th grade students and their learning: I learned that the 4th grade students get distracted easily and it is sometimes hard to get them to be interactive with the lesson.
• Planning and teaching: Planning and teaching is very tedious and it is important to pay attention to the little details within your lesson. It is also important to collaborate with your other teachers and make sure everyone is on the same page.
• Personal social studies learning and how to teach it: It is important to make sure that when teaching social studies you make your lesson fun, creative, and interactive or else it can get boring quickly. When teaching social studies, or any subject, you must also make sure that you know the material very well.

My group and I also collectively discussed what we learned from working together as a team during our fieldwork experience and wrote a group reflection. Some of the most important takeaways that we came up with was:

• Group planning went well, everyone was always responsive in our group chat and always blocked out time in their schedule to meet and discuss for our lesson plans. 
• Although we had individual google meets and each teacher taught part of the lesson, the students gravitated towards the teachers in the classroom, even though they would remind the students to raise their hand in the meet or type in the chat. 
• 50 minutes go by quickly planning for it was challenging because you need to keep in mind the time it will take the students to get to your task and accomplish the tasks.

Overall, my experience with teaching the 4th graders at Bishop Dunn was very insightful and exciting. I learned a lot of new things and it made my love for teaching grow even more. I truly cannot wait to have my own classroom one day and have the opportunity to leave an impact on students.