Teaching the West: Day 3

I've found that there are days that teaching clicks, and days that things don't go quite as planned. Day 3 was one of the latter days. For the day, we'd set aside 5 minutes for review of the day before, 25-30 minutes for group presentations (one on each of 5 important natural areas in the West: Yellowstone, Redwood Forest, Mt St Helens, Glacier National Park, Death Valley), and then we had about 10 minutes at the end to go over cultural groups in the West and review the day. The presentations were going to take up a major chunk of the period, as each presentation was supposed to be 3-4 minutes (according to the rubric we made up), and we were worried about not having enough time.

Of course, as I said before, things just didn't go that way. I timed each presentation, and every one of them was between 50 and 90 seconds long. Half as long as they were supposed to be. The thing was, most groups got in all the information they needed to, and I hadn't been there the day before (since we had M, T, Th, Fri, M set for teaching) so I hadn't been able to regulate and check up on the students' progress. Our CI took over for that inbetween day, Wednesday, so the projects were really as she structured them during practice and whatever students remembered me saying. I left a lesson plan for her, but obviously she had control of how things went. The only other problem was that the presenters often didn't speak loud enough--I would definitely include "speaks loudly and clearly" in the rubric next time I do something like this. I would also put more emphasis on the rubric--I didn't have enough time to really go over it well, so students seemed somewhat confused by the rubric.

Despite the time/volume dilemma, the presentations were actually pretty good. Students seem to enjoy creating and performing them, as they were supposed to be creative presentations. All the groups chose a skit of some kind--a tour of the area, a diary entry acted out, or a class being taught about one of the areas.

Since the presentations were shorter than I'd planned, I had a lot more time than I thought I would to go over the cultural setup of the West and to review. I was able to fill the time pretty easily with the material, but I was a bit flustered by the unexpected change in timing for the lesson, so I didn't come away from the lesson feeling as confident about it as I had coming out of Tuesday's lesson.

I think for future lessons like these, I would be more realistic about my time expectations. 3-4 minutes can be a long time for 4th graders, especially when the unit teacher isn't around the day they practice to note their progress and give suggestions on how to lengthen the presentations. I would also be more flexible in my planning, having a back-up plan in case presentations run short (or long). For example, in retrospect, I think it would've been better if I'd opened up the floor for questions/compliments after each presentation to keep to my time schedule, as well as to give each presentation's subject more exposure time in the class (so the kids would be more likely to pay attention, and to remember what was being said about each natural area).

The lessons I take from this day of my unit echo what I said in my first blog on my metaphor for teaching. You have to flexible as a teacher--not just having a back-up plan in mind (for preventive measures), but also being able to react appropriately as a situation arises.