Improving My Teaching

My first lesson left me feeling incredibly defeated. After gaining previous experience teaching a yr 11 Ancient History class of 15 boys, I was totally underprepared for what 26, year 9 girls could be like. The lesson was a teacher-fueled discussion, revising the skills of analyzing sources. Battling nervousness, a new teacher up the back plus a university supervisor and 26 new faces, I struggled to clearly communicate and get across the information to the girls. They couldn’t follow my board work as it was not set out clearly, they knew far less than what I had expected, and simply they just looked bored (which did not lift my confidence at all.

In order to not have a repeat of this lesson I reflected on what went wrong, what worked, what needed to scrapped or tweaked, what was engaging, and what management strategies work.

David Nockles’ Student Perception of Effective Schooling discusses research that shows “students perceive good teachers and good teaching skills as essential in effective schools. The students were explicit in their desire to have teachers well grounded in their subject area, as well as possessing ability to communicate and impart their knowledge to students well. Many students spoke about learning styles and measured good teachers as not only those that taught them well, but ones that had a diversity of teaching approaches and were able to engage all the students at different times and in different ways. Nevertheless the most important element of a good teacher was one with whom an individual was able to communicate”.

My problem with this lesson can come down to just one thing – lack of preparation. The NSW Institute of Teachers, element 3 requires me to ‘plan and implement coherent lessons and lesson sequences that are designed to engage students and address learning outcomes’. My lack of preparation resulted in my not being able to do this. Having a well thought out and structured lesson would have allowed the students to follow what was going on and would have made my message a lot clearer. Also having an organized lesson would have enabled me to use teaching methodologies that met a range of different learning types and more actively engaged students.

References

Nockles, D., Student Perception of Effective Schooling. University of Sydney, Australia. Retrieved 16^th September 2010, available at; http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/5322