Microteaching

Last week, I embarked on my microteaching adventure at Bellefonte High School. We were tasked with creating a 3-day unit taught during one period for three days with two fellow cohort members. This assignment is to give us practice teaching to current high school students before student teaching in the spring. Mrs. Poorman was kind enough to welcome my group and I with open arms into three of her Ag classes.

I was tasked with teaching during Mrs. Poorman's Ag Mechanics class. When I first received this information, I was excited but nervous. I wasn't sure where to start when creating my lessons for only three days. After some time to mull over my options, I decided that I would not use Mrs. Poorman's shop during my lessons as I was not familiar enough with the equipment available and the shop set up. This left me with doing lecture type lessons with some hands-on activities in the classroom that would not require the use of any equipment. After making this decision, I decided to seek advice from Penn State faculty member John Seaman on what fun hands-on activities I could do that did not require the use of machinery. He was able to direct me to many resources and ideas that I took and adapted to work in the environment I would be teaching in.

On the first day, I chose to teach about safety and some equipment identification. I geared my lesson towards welding as the students had just started into this unit with Mrs. Poorman. Overall I think my lesson went very well. Students stayed engaged and asked questions throughout the lesson. One student even said he would recommend me as a teacher! I was glad that my first day was a success! While everything went smooth, there are a few tweaks and minor changes that I plan on making to lesson in order for me to use it in the spring for my student teaching internship.

With the first day being a success, I was pumped for the two remaining days. Unfortunately, the weather had other plans. A terrible snowstorm swept through the State College area which forced schools to close both Thursday and Friday.

I had a great time microteaching even though it was only for one day. Mrs. Poorman offered me feedback which I plan to use when tweaking my lesson that I taught.