Reflection
After the completion of microteaching three I can see that I have progressed in
my use of the teaching skills learned throughout the semester in KINES 366.
Microteaching has taught me a lot about myself as a teacher and what things I do well
and also what methods and skills I need to improve in order to be the most effective
teacher that I can be. I feel that the class as a whole has prepared me to be a better
teacher and I feel confident since I have skills that I have learned through microteaching
now in my very own teaching toolbox! After watching my microteaching three lesson I
was able to see some of my strengths and also my weaknesses. Nobody is perfect!
There are skills that I feel I still need to learn but that problem will be fixed once I finish
taking the required PHETE option courses here at Penn State!
I would first like to address what I did well in my microteaching three lesson. The
biggest improvement I made from microteaching two to microteaching three was
increasing the activity time of the students during my lesson. In microteaching two the
students were engaged for only 23.5% of lesson which is not good. However in
microteaching three my students were engaged for exactly 50% and that is what is
expected from a teacher’s lesson! In addition I reduced the amount of wait time from
20.5% in my microteaching two lesson to 9.7% in my microteaching three lesson! That
was probably one of my biggest strengths of the third lesson that I taught. Furthermore I
decreased the amount of instruction time during my lesson from 41.1% to 26%. I did this
by talking while I was demonstrating to make the instruction smoother, quicker and
more effective with student volunteers to help me. I learned this skill from Donna while
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doing our teaching clinics. Lastly another strength of mine is providing feedback to the
students. There were numerous occasions as can be noted by my feedback analysis
form where I provided feedback to not just one but each of the students in my lesson.
The distribution of feedback to each student was great!
Even though I displayed a lot of strengths during my microteaching three lesson,
there are things that I still need to work on. My management time went up in
microteaching three to about 20.7% unlike microteaching two where my management
time was only 14.7%. By being more prepared about equipment placement, etc I could
add less transition time and increase my student’s activity time even more! I also need
to work on giving more specific congruent feedback. As noted by my feedback analysis
form and transcription, I provided students with a lot of feedback that was positive but I
never gave them feedback on their technique and connecting that with the cues of the
lesson. Also all of the feedback that I gave to my students was skill related. I never gave
any behavior related feedback. There are many times where I just say “Good job Jen” or
“Awesome Cathy.” I noticed I only said “Good Job” to Jen and never corrected or
commented on her technique. I failed to give specific congruent feedback to all of my
students, I only did it occasionally for some. Furthermore I never checked for
understanding during the lesson by asking the students to restate the cues, etc. I only
checked for understanding during the closure. Checking for understanding during the
lesson would help me see what the students progress is and what they know about the
lesson to succeed at the task. Lastly, I never used scaffolding during my closure. I could
have said something like this, “Next lesson we will be learning the field positions and
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work on pitching skills.” Next time I will make sure that I scaffold as well as providing
information on how batting skills can be used outside of the classroom. My biggest
mistake was not providing challenges to the students. What I thought was a challenge
was really just changing the task for the students. I had the students spin around before
catching the ball during the instant activity. First, I shouldn’t have had a “challenge” or
what I thought was a challenge during the instant activity and secondly it was just a
variation of the task. What I could of done for the first activity was see how many
consecutive hits each group of three could hit during a 30 second interval. Also during
the second activity where the groups were batting off of the tee I could have had the
students see if they could hit the ball off the tee 25 times as a group in a 30 second
period. This would test their quickness and readiness to switch positions.
Next, I have learned so much from the microteaching experience. I have learned
how effective intra-task variation is in making a lesson most effective for certain
students. During my microteaching three lesson, I offered Alyssa M (can be seen in
transcription) the bigger bat to help make it easier for her to hit the ball. If I didn’t use
intra-task variation the activity may have become boring to her since she wasn’t
succeeding. I also learned through the experience that your mood and enthusiasm as a
teacher affects that of your students. My first microteaching lesson wasn’t that great
because I didn’t show enough enthusiasm and passion for the lesson as I should have
and therefore the students seemed bored and uninterested. The more hyped I am to
teach, the more hyped the students are too learn. In addition, I learned so many skills
along with intra-task variation as stated above from the microteaching experience that
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will only benefit me as a future health and physical educator. I learned how to challenge
the students to make the lesson more engaging, how to use teaching by invitation
properly in order to provide students with options that will most benefit them during
the lesson to be successful at completeing the tasks, and also how to manage my lesson
time to make the most activity time and decrease wait time. Everything I learned from
the microteaching experience will come with me when I leave Penn State and enter the
school’s as a teacher.
Finally there are a few things that I still need to learn in order to become the
best and most effective physical education teacher. I need to learn how to speak more
fluently. I have taken CAS 100A but I still feel that my speaking skills could be improved
upon as you can see in my transcription. I stutter a lot because I talk to fast and don’t
think before I speak. I also need to learn more effective set inductions. Providing a
picture and statistics will only be interesting to students until a certain point. I know we
discussed different set inductions in class but how could I improve upon my delivery of
the set induction? Also I need to learn how to provide more effective strategies to the
students while they are participating the lesson. Not once during microteaching did I
provide the students with different strategies that may help them excel further in the
task.
Overall, the microteaching experience was a great one. I learned a lot of
important skills that will help me excel as a teacher. The work that came after
microteaching (i.e. time-coding, transcription, etc.) took a long time but it was worth
seeing what things I did well and what I need to work on. It was pretty cool seeing
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myself teach from a different stand point other than myself teaching, even though I
hate what I sound like on video! Microteaching is a very helpful assignment in growing
teaching students that should be done in the semesters to come.
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