EDSE 500 TEAM Self-Video

I hate to say this, because it seems so self-satisfied, but actually I enjoy watching myself teach. I feel like I am doing a lot of things right, and I am pleased with the demeanor I have in the classroom. I am relaxed yet confident, do no over-talk, give lots of encouragement, praise, and thank-you’s for student participation, and take ownership of my own ignorance and mistakes when they come up without making myself look stupid. Although my lessons often involve a lot of direct instruction, working through procedures by example, as is typical for my subject at this grade level, it has become second nature for me to involve students in my lectures extensively, particularly by asking a lot of questions and inviting confident students to work examples on the board. Particularly in combination with cold-calling, this style seems to work fairly well for me most of the time.

Friday was the end of our week of so-called “TEAM” teaching evaluations. For the first time, our teaching was being evaluated for an actual grade. At first it was pretty frustrating, as I complained so bitterly in the previous post, but by the end of the week I guess I was getting better and better at dancing the dance, and I received 97% on my final two days of evaluation. Hooray! Well Friday was also my day to be videotaped.

I seem to have a good self-awareness I suppose, because when I watch a recording of myself teaching, it replays almost exactly as I remember the class session. No surprises, except the weirdness of hearing my voice the way others hear it, which is goofier, higher-pitched and more nasal—but in a loveable sort of way, right?—than the way it resonates in my head. Also I noticed that my butt looks more bean bag-like than I ever imagined, at least in those particular Dockers I was wearing that day. This after bicycling 1500 miles in a little over three weeks, just two months ago! Oh well.

Also my teaching voice is not very loud at all. I think this is a good thing, a little teaching trick I learned with experience. When you more or less shout to your students, it sort of gives them the okay in a way to make more noise, because they know you can still be heard regardless. But if you talk to your students with a very normal conversational volume, they have to stay quiet in order to hear what you have to say. It works! It also helps you maintain an aura of calm control.

The biggest problem with my lesson was my excruciatingly slow pace of ending the warm-up and set-up. The (admittedly short 40-minute) period was half over before we even began the activity that was meant to be the actual body of the lesson. The warm-up was particularly problematic, even though it consisted of only three problems. After walking around to check their progress (which was excellent), I asked several students individually to share their answers on the board. At first I felt comfortable doing this, because my lesson plan was not overly ambitious for time. But it took the students much longer than I imagined to write out their work. The whole thing took substantially longer than it should have. In a realistic setting, this would have been a classroom management problem as well, because students had finished their work already and sat for several minutes while their classmates were writing so slowly on the board. I had a sense at some point during this segment of the lesson that my time management was not going well, and this is consistent with the feedback I received from the veteran teacher who observed me. She suggested that, if all students were doing well with the work, as they were, I could have just asked the students to write their answers only, as opposed to all of the work, on the board. Advice well taken.

My set-up was also a bit long, but I feel like this is more understandable, as I was recapping the whole week’s material for the “test on Monday.” I also revisited my set from the day before, as there had been a question as to what the I for electric current stands for (actually a French word, intensité). I received positive feedback for researching and coming back to the class with the answer to that question. Overall, I think it was okay, I just needed to hurry up the transition out of the warm-up to begin with.

The main of my lesson was a review activity based on the “I have” / “Who has?” concept. You pass out cards with numbers on top. Each card also has a question that generally begins, “Who has my number . . .” with some arithmetic operation to perform. The cards thus link to each other, creating a chain. Students have to work out the arithmetic to see if they have the next card. Only my activity was a bit more challenging, because it was using arithmetic operations with complex numbers, the topic of my unit for the week. I think I did a good job of explaining the activity, asking for questions and allowing good wait time (which eventually did result in a request for an example), and also setting my expectation that the students work out every instance of complex multiplication and division on paper. Somewhere in the middle, there was an error in the cards that I made, and I probably could have jumped on that mistake much sooner. However, it worked out okay, because one student was able to suggest that he had a card similar to but not quite the correct answer.

I think I have consistently allowed pretty decent wait time when I ask questions, but I see that I am just a couple seconds away from ideal. I will try to wait even a little bit longer, because there seems to be a significant value difference between, say a wait time of 5 seconds and a wait time of 7 or 8 seconds. I forgot to time my actual waits. That would have been interesting. I do see that they are not bad, but just a few seconds on the short side.

One of my classmates commented about me saying “’kay” a lot in class that day. After watching myself, I do not really agree that it was excessive or distracting. I responded with “’kay” a number of times in between pauses while students were explaining their work, but only in order to give encouragement and prompt them to continue. I honestly think it was constructive okay-ing and not distracting.