Life Knowledge Reflection

When I went to teach my life knowledge lesson at Juniata Valley, let me tell you I was so excited. My initial thought was these are going to be my students in just a few short weeks. The life knowledge lesson I chose was one on leadership. I had a group of 9 students. the leadership lesson I had was packed full of activities. So many in fact I had to adapt and choose certain ones that I had to cut.

There were a couple times that I had to use some classroom management skills. There are 4 instances that stuck with me.

1.) Two students were goofing off a little with one another and I attempted to use proximity, but when that failed I ended up having to use the good old "let's keep our hands to ourselves" line. They stopped afterwards.

2.) When we were discussing leaders on a national, or international level one of the students started making jokes about our president, which got the other students off track because they thought his comments were funny. I took that as a learning opportunity to point out to them that our president is still a leader, regardless of what anyone's opinion on that leader is. After I said that it made them think about what they were saying a little and the rowdiness stopped.

3.) there were two students that were talking when I was giving instruction on the next activity. How did I handle that? I finished giving my instruction and then preceded to ask one of the students if they could share with the class what the instructions I had given were. After he looked at me like a deer in headlights I had one of the students that did listen to my instruction repeat what I had said to them. He listened that time.

4.) The last one that sticks out to me is there was a worksheet where they had to figure out what the one word definition for leadership was by looking at different leaders. On that worksheet the one word definition was a scrambled word at the bottom. one of the students thought they would be tricky and use a word unscramble on his laptop. When I caught him he said he was just looking up more information on the people they were supposed to be reading about. He kept pushing me on it for a couple seconds, but I looked at him with a smile and sternly said "shut the computer". He shut it and that was the end of that.

Once again I had a problem with timing and pacing just like I had problems with when I was micro teaching. That's something I really have to work on and any advice people can give to me would be greatly appreciated.

Overall, the students seemed to have fun and I had fun watching them work and interacting with them. I also learned that sometimes it may not be easier to teach a smaller class because there's less chance for participation and there's a lot of voluntolding that happens. However, after working with those student's it only made me happier to be going to Juniata Valley in the spring.