Final Thoughts on Lab

Lab this semester was not exactly as I expected. I knew from talking to previous cohorts and watching the videos during final presentations, how the basic format would be; but I didn't know how much lab could change the way I think about teaching. During our very first lab, we picked a random topic and had to teach it the following week to our peers. Looking back now, I would not teach that lesson the same way I did then, nor many of my lessons I taught throughout the semester. The changes I would make to many of my lessons are not because I didn't write them as best I could originally, but because now I know better techniques to use to teach them. Now I know more classroom management strategies, and I know what to do when I want my students to be more engaged, and less distracted.

Teaching my peers was both easy and difficult at the same time - on the one hand, they were your friends, you knew them and knew their personality, regardless of what character role-card they pulled you knew how to "manage" their behavior. It also took away some of the pressure, in labs you knew it was practice and that you weren't in charge of real students yet (at least not until our Micro-teaching and LifeKnowledge labs). However, while this did decrease some of the stress, it also made teaching a little harder, for most of our lessons our "students" needed prior knowledge or some parts of our lessons didn't make sense, this sometimes made it difficult to direct questions and explain materials.

Overall, while I learned a lot about classroom management and planning and implementing of lessons from lab, my biggest takeaway has been reflection. While I hated teaching on camera, having the ability to not only reflect on my experiences through writing our blogs, but also being able to watch and comment on not only my own teaching videos but also those of my peers, was extremely helpful. Though using the technology of ThereNow to watch, upload, and comment on videos was sometimes difficult, and keeping track of all the reflective requirements was frustrating, it was very useful and helped me pick up on things I may not have realized I was and wasn't doing while teaching, and letting me learning from what my peers were and weren't doing when they were teaching.

So while lab was sometimes frustrating, stressful, and not always the best thing to have at 8AM, I learned a lot and while being one of the first few to go through it every week sometimes felt like being a guinea pig, it was nice to go through it without the bias of hearing about anything from the cohort. I am glad that lab is over and I do feel more prepared for student teaching than I was at the beginning of the semester, though I know I still have more to learn. Here's to finishing one semester of learning and reflection and moving onto the next one.