Learning Experiences in EPHE 452
Learning Experiences in EPHE 452 in order to generate evidence of developing competence.
- Plan, teach and reflect on implementing a mini games unit in a local school.
- Complete peer-teaching session and reflect on feedback to develop your practice.
- Give productive feedback to peers to enhance your teaching practice.
- Engage in productive on-line communications to promote own and peers learning in the class.
Reflection
Assessment: To what level of competency do you feel you are performing the learning implied in this big idea?
Evidence: How does the evidence show your developing competencies in relation to this big idea?
Personal growth: What can you now do based on this evidence?
Goal: What is something you want to work on or improve on in relation to this big idea?
Reflection Prompts
Assessment: To what level of competency do you feel you are performing the learning implied in this big idea? I believe my level of competency in collaborating with my peers on our teachings is proficient and moving towards extending at this point in time. I have more experience in a class setting than a lot of my peers and some come to me for feedback on their lessons and how to format them.
Evidence: The discussion I had with Tim on google classroom shows my competency ability on that chapter with the introduction of baseball into a school. There are many variations or games to get the rules of baseball without having to play the game itself. My summary of the obstacles we encountered demonstrates my ability to adjust and overcome obstacles to put a lesson into action.
Personal growth: Doing the peer review for my colleagues Ben and Marissa made it easier to understand what I needed to improve on. Watching them have student lead demonstrations was a big one that I need to get better at including in my lessons. Not only does teaching help you become a better teacher but also watching others teach and seeing similar things you do that make you realize there’s a better way of doing it. Doing this activity made me a better teacher and a student in learning how to evaluate and watch other to help them improve but also myself.
Goal: I would like to improve upon my teaching methods and connecting the dots of the big ideas more with the curriculum and having students more engaged in the entire lesson.
Peer Teaching Reflection
For our peer teaching lesson today we had 12 participants. We used 3 badminton courts set up, as well as the rest of the gym using markers for our progression games. The lesson we taught was meant to be the first of our unit for our grade six students. We also adapted our lesson before teaching because the previous volleyball co-teaching pair had some similar concepts.
Our intent for this unit was to get students lots of touches with the forearm pass and setting. Our cues were to bend your legs, get behind the ball, and we also incorporated some target practice with our peers. This however, will probably not be the case in our class based on our observation. Using these cues our objectives were to get a rally going and pass the ball over the net, while communicating as a team.
Having two co-teachers was beneficial because it offers more opportunity for us to help students individually without disrupting the rest of the class. We did not have any demonstrations which could have facilitated more understanding of the game and what is being asked of the students. We would have set up the gym beforehand, however based on time we left the gym as it was previously set up. We would have had more free space between the two courts.
We designed this class to have lots of on-the-ball movement to try to increase individual skill and understanding. However, since our class is quite athletic and experienced this was lost on some of them. We think that the cues we were giving were good, but were very simple for the skill level of our class.
When we put our peers back into our culminating game we noticed an increase in communication as well as skill. The games were more competitive, and rallies lasted longer. Our progression games allowed our peers to cognitively think about their body position, spacial awareness on the court, and communicate effectively to work together as a team.
We feel that we both need to work to incorporate demonstrations as well as clarify our cues in our teaching. This will allow students to have a better understanding of what is being asked of them, and greater skill acknowledgement. It was also brought up to us that we could have included more reinforcing cues during our culminating game, which we will bring into our lesson at Lansdowne.
In our upcoming lessons at Lansdowne we will use the recommendations by Tim and our peers to help improve our teaching. These include; creating boundaries and targets to move student’s partners around, as well as creating different shaped courts to force partners to think about their pass to an open space to gain a point.
In conclusion, we feel that this experience was beneficial. Having the chance to run through our lesson before teaching it in a school gave us important insights and feedback on how we can improve to better promote student learning and understanding.