Learning While Teaching

 After my first week of instruction at Wilmington Area School District, I have one main goal to focus on for the next week. Clarity.

I believe that my lessons that I taught this week were received well by my students. As I am starting my welding unit in my Building and Trades class, I think that my excitement in teaching a shop class is showing in my lessons. My students are really not used to some of the activities that I am doing with them but they are still being perceived well and they are starting to adjust to them. For example, today, I had my students play a game of telephone with the definition of welding. At first, they just kind of looked at me wondering if I was serious or not, but eventually they got it and actually had some fun with it. 

One of the things that I am trying to do is incorporate ideas and activities into the lessons that are not typical for high school classes. I hope that this creates some excitement among the students to come to my classes ready for the lesson because they know that it will be different.

The drawback to that is because a lot of it is not already operationalized in their minds, that I need to deliver good instructions on the activities. Which is why that is my goal, as I pick up my second class on Monday. Delivering clear instruction sets to my students on what I expect and what I am asking them to do will better streamline my lessons and not make them seem so choppy.

I want to finish with a high note though. I have a student who shows up and is willing to participate, but not always the most excited or ready for the day. When I did a foldable welder activity with the class today, his was definitely the most impressive and I was excited to see him put that much effort into something that I did not think he would enjoy as much!

Peace out till next week!