Hello,
I'm Chad Ownby, I am a recent graduate from Longwood University. Last fall, I completed my student teaching experience for theatre education . And what an experience it was. I kept thinking throughout the entire placement that it would be an awesome sitcom. I figured this blog would be a good place to share the experience I had with fellow teachers, aspiring teachers, or anyone interested.
The first lesson: Man this is exciting. My first ever lesson. I have been here about a month and I finally get a chance to show what I can do. My supervisor is coming from Longwood to observe me for the first time. I have a great relationship with her so I am not too nervous but I am very motivated to do well. The lesson should be pretty cool. I will be teaching the theatre production class and have prepared an awesome power point on the different technical jobs in professional theatre. I also prepared a Jeopardy game. I was excited because this was my favorite aspect of theatre production and I was going to get to share it with the students.
That is about where the positivity ended.
The first lesson I really learned first hand is that Theatre production is honestly and truly the dumping ground class. While several of the students were excited to be there, there were just as many who were just placed in the class and quite frankly could not care less. It makes pulling teeth look like playing laser tag(orrrr something universally fun). This is where my biggest mistake came into play. I assumed that because I loved this material, that the kids would too. This could not be further from the truth. I actually had one student say "are we done yet, because this is really boring." It was pretty much a kiss of death for my lesson. Of course because they had no interest, the students began either falling asleep, or acting up, which of course makes sense since they were not engaged in the material. Their behavior threw me off and my pacing of the lecture became ultra monotonous and I kept stopping to address bad behavior. The second big mistake I made was saying "This stuff is pretty boring huh?" My thought process was that I was letting the students know how they felt. Unfortunately all it did was reaffirm their opinion on the lesson and so any attention they were giving me was gone. I was about three fourths of the way done with my lesson when I decided to abandon the power point and instead play an improv game. This was the thing that I did right. Getting the students up and moving definately seemed to wake them up. From there we played the Jeopardy game which was meant with a decent reception for the students. Of course, I was not completely out of the woods yet. I did not time my lesson accurately and we were left with about 10 extra minutes. I learned a very valuable lesson that day: always be prepared for your lesson to be too short by preparing extra material.
After the lesson, My teacher, my supervisor and myself all sat down to discuss the lesson. By this point I was exasperated and exhausted. Luckily for me, both of them were very nice and super supportive. I had the sinking suspicion that they had both been in my position before. It was almost like a right of passage for new teachers to crash and burn I think. I remember having a job interview months later where I brought this lesson up and the interviewer began to chuckle remember his first lesson. The conversation with my supervisor and teacher was very much like an acting critique, starting with the positive, giving me some suggestions for feedback, then ending on a positive note. I ended up leaving the room with mixed emotions. On one hand, I am a total perfectionist. On the other hand, I always welcome feedback and looked at it as an opportunity to learn. One thing was certain though, my next lesson would go much much better.
I hoped.
No comments:
Post a Comment