Does this Interest You?

This past week in our AEE 412 lab we had to do a ten minute lesson on an interest approach we would use in one of our lessons. First I should say, I LOVED this! I was so surprised by all my other classmates' creativeness to create effective interest approaches. I thought my classmates really stepped up their game this week. As a result we all gained more ideas about how we could create variability to our classrooms and utilize these different interest approaches. I know I jotted down these good ideas and I hope to use them in my future lesson plans. They were all more tools that we can add to out toolbox! 

After reviewing my own video I was able to depict some of my own strengths and weaknesses. By now I think most people have picked up on the fact that I have a pretty outgoing and sometimes eccentric personality. Although sometimes I get the label "spunky" I think this allows me to be comfortable in front of my learners and enthusiastic about teaching. I think this is one of my strengths that also allows me to be engaging with my students.

I was very happy with the results of my lab this week. I definitely prepared more and I believe improvement was the result. If you were to look at my video last week, you might notice that I said "um" more than one is suppose too. I found that it became really annoying after awhile and my students probably thought the same thing! I noticed that from watching my video and therefore this week my goal for myself was to develop a strategy that would help me not use these filler words. Being prepared definitely helped with this. Because I had my agenda for myself for class memorized and knew exactly what activity was coming next, the words naturally came to me. In the lab before I think I struggled remembering what task to cover next in class and this resulted in me using filler words. It appears though that I am progressing. My strategy? Prepare and practice!

I notice that I also struggle with a "being in the zone" problem. It's not a huge problem and most people may not even pick up on it; however, what happens is that I get very excited and enthusiastic about the content that I'm teaching or the activity we are about to do that I loose sight of my actual students involvement. I forget to mentally observe if my students are "checked in" or "checked out." I think to help this I might need to just slow down a bit. This is allow for amble time to check for understanding and still cover all necessary content.

Overall, I learned the importance of an interest approach and strategies I can utilize to hook my learners into my lesson. These are valuable skills that will help my students learn content more easily and engage them more in my classroom. This was a good learning experience for me and I hope to continue to gather resources that will help me to develop awesome sauce interest approaches for each of my lessons!