Planning for this group-teach has been an interesting experience and has really let me see how much work really goes on behind the scenes before a lesson is even presented to a class. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to produce a truly effective and engaging lesson, but hopefully in the end we will be successful!
When we first started out planning, it seemed chaotic and overwhelming. We had no clue where to begin with things and just looked at everything that had to be done. Needless to say, we barely got anything accomplished during that first meeting and knew that we had to approach everything differently. As we met more and more, we began to discuss ideas that came to mind when we thought about our topic of “Teaching Conflict: Adolescence at War” and the novels associated with it. Throughout our discussions, we tended to feed off of one another’s ideas and ended up coming up with some great ideas. From all of these ideas that we threw out, we began to build up what we wanted to do. This really showed me how important collaboration is to teaching and with your co-workers. Without this, you really cannot produce a successful lesson.
At our next meeting, we had a really great idea come about from a group member. We decided that the best way to go about this was to split up the different parts so that each group member could focus in on a small part of the whole unit and develop some strong ideas for a lesson. We could then bring all of these together and combine all of our thoughts into a powerful unit. We created a checklist so that each person had a part to work on and was held accountable for, which I think is very important. We then met and had discussions of what we wrote down as a rough draft lesson plan and what we thought might be interesting to do and where to go with the lesson. Everything seemed to be coming together nicely which felt really great and didn’t seem as much of a struggle. I think the idea of making a checklist of everything that needed to be done and distributing the lessons really helped us out a lot. This showed me how important of a role organization really does play into developing lessons and units and teaching overall.
At this point, we know exactly what lessons we would like to incorporate and what homework will be given. We now need to work on combining each individual part into a complete, organized unit. We are working on finalizing our own parts at this point, and then we are meeting with Shannon this coming week for our group meeting and hopefully this will help bring all of our findings and ideas together in a nice, smooth way. I am really excited to see the final outcome of it all.
Overall, it has been a great experience with my group and I have learned a lot about the planning process with teaching. There is so much more to teaching than you really think. It amazes me to think that as a student I thought teachers had an “easy” job. My views have completely changed now! I am very excited to actually teach our lesson to the class and see how our hard work has paid off.
