What Teaching 4th Grade Taught Me

As teaching 4th grade science came and went, I learned a lot about preparing lesson plans, implementing them, and of course, teaching an entire class.  At first, the idea of standing in front of 23 4th graders sounded a little intimidating.  I've never taught a whole class before! However, when I stood up there it felt very natural to me.  The moments that I was standing in front of the class and teaching them reassured me that I am doing the right thing; I definitely want to be a teacher.  All of my fieldwork experiences give me that reassurance that I am going to love what I do when I get a job. 

The hardest part of this experience was not necessarily teaching the students, but it was getting everything together to teach the students; creating the lesson plan.  Thankfully, we work in groups in this course for fieldwork.  I usually prefer to do things on my own; I'm not one to jump right into the group project.  Although, working collaboratively with my group to form a direct instruction and inquiry lesson was a good experience.  Being able to bring four different ideas together to form one whole really makes a great lesson.  As teachers in schools, we need to know how to effectively collaborate with our colleagues.  We are going to be a part of teams in our school, and we are going to have to work with other professionals.  This experience, and others throughout my education program, have taught me a lot about this. 

During the lesson planning process, I learned that it is important to clearly plan out what you want to do.  When you are working in a group, you all sit down together and organize what you are going to do and how you are going to do it.  As you are planning, you learn to take a lot of things into consideration as well, such as, the materials you have access to, the needs/behaviors of the students, and the room in general.  This affects planning because you may or may not be able to do a certain part of your lesson because of the amount of students, if the students will do what you are asking of them appropriately, if the space of the classroom allows you to do what you want, etc.  Particularly during our inquiry lesson, we ran into some of these obstacles. We knew because of the materials we had we needed two groups of students, but we also knew that we could not have the students act as orbiters in our lesson because they would not appropriately walk around the planet; it would have caused a lot of ruckus.  I mainly noticed that during lesson planning, you are always thinking about the students.  Will they be able to read the text on this slide? Will the understand the material in the way that I am presenting it to them? Will this guided practice effectively go over what they learned today? As a teacher you are constantly thinking about what will make this lesson clear and understandable, but also engaging.  The students learning is our number one priority.

As we were planning our direct instruction lesson we were focused on all of the things that we were going to teach to the students.  This lesson was teacher centered because we were teaching them the material for the first time, and we were responsible for the learning of the students on that day.  For the inquiry lesson we were focused on how we were going to make the students investigate something.  In this lesson, it is student centered; the students were responsible for their own learning.  They went through the steps of the scientific method to solve a problem with their group.

Actually doing the lessons we planned in front of the whole class also taught me a lot.  Teaching your lessons teaches you to always be practical about what you are planning to do.  You can write anything on paper and make it sound wonderful; however, is it going to work for the students in your class? As teachers, we get these wonderful ideas in our heads and sometimes they just don't work the way we planned. It is okay for lessons to not always work! To me that is what helps us grow as educators.  Seeing what works and what doesn't work in a class helps us to change the lesson to make sure the material is communicated clearly.

 Implementing the lesson also taught me a lot about classroom management.  Having a system in place to keep the students focused and quiet is fantastic, but you have to use it consistently for it to work. I think the ideas for the lessons my group planned and what we did worked great, but we needed to work on keeping the students from getting too loud.


Finally, the students were the center of the whole experience.  Working in front of a class taught me the importance of being highly organized.  The students are ready to go when you are teaching. 
This also means that you need to double check everything that you give the students, to do, and that they will be able to navigate through what they are doing independently.  During our direct instruction, the students were having trouble navigating through our note sheet.  This was a learning experience for me to make sure that everything is clear. You need to make sure that you know exactly how everything is going to work and give the students clear expectations. The students feed off of the energy you give off so, always be positive.  The students also taught me to really know the material you are teaching.  There is always going to be at least one student in class that is going to have some in depth question that is way beyond you may ever believe they would think of to ask.  I know that we aren't perfect and we can't know absolutely everything, but know as much as you can!

I am very grateful for this experience.  Doing this really confirms, maybe even does not confirm for some, that you really want to be a teacher.  It allowed me to learn from the students in this class so that I can be ready for my own class some day.