Days 17-25 - Teaching Experiences

During the past week I have had the opportunity to taste a little bit of what teachers do. I taught students going into fifth and sixth grade with two other governor's school students. We did this through a program called Youth University (YU) at UT Chattanooga. It was an awesome experience. We all had to do thorough lesson plans, implement guidelines and classroom rules, practice classroom management, and teach for an hour and twenty minutes. While we were doing all of these things we were also getting observed by UTC staff and some of our governor's school counselors. They all gave us a lot of input, including things we did very well and things we needed to improve on. It was a tremendous learning experience that I can reflect on as I am considering a career in education.

My group was given the topic of Knights and Castles. What we did was we took that topic and taught about things related to that time period, the Middle Ages. Every day we had the kids interact with us while we were teaching and we periodically completed projects so the kids had something hands-on to do and so they could have a chance to be creative. This worked very well for us and it seems that the kids learned a lot. By today, they could respond appropriately to questions we asked them about topics discussed this week. They all also did very well on a jeopardy game we played in class today. This also happens to be a jeopardy game that we designed in our tech class.

This week was very fun, but also hard work. I learned some things I am good at and some things I need help with. But after all, an effective teacher is always learning and seeing what works and what does not.