A Reflection on my Fieldwork Experience

        Overall, I think this experience was very worthwhile and unique. It was unique because instead of teaching one grade in a classroom during the school day, my class was able to teach multiple grades, students from different schools, and for a longer period of time after school. I know that this period of time was illogical in reality, but it was nice to have in the moment. 
           This overall process of creating lessons, modifying the lessons, and implementing them  in front of the students was a very time consuming process, but worth it. My lessons that I taught were focused on the three types of rocks and their characteristics. Rocks is an important topic because we see them everyday in our lives and they also make up many of our world's land forms and play a part in creating the world we live in today.
Since it was so much work, I couldn't do it alone. I worked with two other candidates to construct and implement these lessons.  We meet occasionally to toss around ideas and work with each other to create a fun and engaging set of lessons. Each of us had something to contribute to the lesson. I found the table for our inquiry lesson and I created the graphic organizer for our direct instruction lesson. My other members created the Voki for our inquiry lesson, found the video for our direct instruction, and designed the PowerPoint slides. My group and I worked very well together and seemed to  understand each other's teaching styles. When team teaching this is very important to know what kind of teaching style each teacher prefers. This is important in order to not overshadow any of your co-teachers. 
          Our lessons in general went over well. There were a few hiccups, but nothing is ever perfect. One of the major issues with our lessons was our direct instruction graphic organizer. My co-teachers and I quickly realized this graphic organizer was too hard for the students and one student in particular was getting very frustrated and upset over it. If we were to do this lesson over again, we would replace our graphic organizer with something much simpler and shorter. 
         This issue also lead to another issue which I noticed after teaching, I spoke too fast and flipped too fast through the slides. Since I went too fast, it was very difficult for the students to keep up with filling in the graphic organizer and some students even checked out of the lesson. 
         It wasn't until the inquiry lesson that I could tell if the students were actually grasping the information or not. Each students liked the activity and used lots of questions which is directly outlined in the inquiry format. The student who was frustrated with the graphic organizer quickly involved himself in the small group activity and seemed to take charge. This is a classic example of never judge a book by its cover. What I mean by this is that I truly thought this student became frustrated with the graphic organizer and then simply gave up on learning the material, when in fact this student actually understood most of the material presented and was solely frustrated about not being able to keep up with filling in the graphic organizer. 
            In conclusion, this fieldwork experience lead to many revelations not only about modifications that must be made to our lessons, but also changes that must be made in me as a teacher. Hopefully by noticing these things, I can turn them into a positive and I can become an even better teacher then I am now.