Lesson Reflections

Post for 12/6

Today's class was useful because it again ended up focusing on the separation and eventually the potential disconnect between our strategies and activities. In a sense, it got us to reflect on the difference between teaching within the vacuum of our plans and the unpolished reality of a classroom, gymnasium or art studio.

What I found interesting for some of us in our group was that planning strategies were wildly different from my own. For example, some of our colleagues were simply given materials for their students' learning activities and asked to facilitate them. Maybe I'm biased but to me this didn't seem like it was the learning experience it could be. While it's useful to stand up in front of a class and practice class management, I think it might be more helpful to practice with materials and plans we've designed ourselves. Because in almost every other situation where we learn from experience, the bad experiences can often teach us more than the good ones upon reflection. That said, I wouldn't say that I crashed and burned with my lessons at all but I recognized where there's room for improvement and what I needed to do in later strategizing sessions. Recognizing shortcomings or earlier blind spots in an ideal world should help the strategizing time become shorter when we distill the basic points of what we would like to teach or know what we should expect from our students.

I also thought that this class session was pretty fun because we got to discuss different aspects of our schools, common issues that come up in different schools and the different challenges our schools face. In a peer review-type process, lesson reflection is seemingly really useful. We get to provide a kind of unvarnished interpretation of our own work, our schools and in return get feedback from bright people trying to work out similar issues in their own reflection. It's a process I'd like to do more of in the future. The workshop model of class work is really useful and can be especially powerful in the process of establishing our own teaching style and ideas.