Can Only Go Up From Here

The first week of our senior year of college and we definitely started out with a bang! We jumped right into the swing of teaching our first mini lessons. We had 15 minutes to teach our group a short lesson on our assigned objectives. My objective for the group was to have them be able to identify the parts of a medieval castle and answer a few basic questions about them. For this lesson, I really wanted to avoid using a power point. I think power points can be boring for students. After teaching this lesson though, I realized some lessons would actually be taught more effectively with a power point. I received a good amount of peer feed back on how having the slides posted largely on a board would of helped them retain the information better. They said it would of been helpful to be able to visualize each part of the castle.

I started this lesson by asking my "students" to brainstorm as many parts of a castle as they could. Then, we moved to an activity where they had to draw their own castles. Many of them drew castles without the fully detailed rooms or ones that more resembled fairytale castles. I liked starting with this activity as it gave a baseline of what we needed to discuss. For example, all of them knew the purpose and where a castle's moat is. So, we briefly skimmed those parts. The parts that were less familiar with we discussed more in depth and went over their locations within the castle. Here is where specific slides for each individual section would of been useful. 

My favorite part of the lesson was the ending activity to assess them on what they had learned. I wish we would of had more time for this activity to take place. The exam was to be completed as a group where each member stood in a different corner of the room and they were not allowed to talk. The team was to fill in the rooms of a blank castle. They had to "discuss" and agree upon the room before they could write it down on the test. To complete the task, they threw papers back and forth. The feedback I received said that they enjoyed the exam activity as it gave them the chance to work together, get up and move, and was not the typical paper and pencil test. 

This lesson gave me many tips and set a good baseline of what I need to do to improve myself as a teacher. I am glad we have this lab to begin to work on our teaching abilities for our future students!