On the Job Training

The fieldwork that I had to complete all along and especially in my last two classes, General Methods and Research in Literacy, were the most productive hours and gave me the greatest sense of accomplishment. When I was in the classroom observing, I would watch the teacher and the student interactions and then think of how I would act in that situation. When I was teaching the lessons for General Methods, I felt pretty comfortable in front of the room. I was well received by the students and any glitches in my lesson plans went unnoticed. The glitches, however, did not go unnoticed by me. I would go home after the lesson and analyze what I could have done differently. For my SIM lesson plan, I had the students do the Jigsaw Learning Method. I got thrown off by the number of students and the home/expert groups and then got a bit anxious because I thought the whole Jigsaw portion of the lesson would be ruined. I had to take the experts from the groups at the end and then make new groups but it all worked out. I discovered that as long as the students were learning, I shouldn't think of my first Jigsaw learning experience as a failure.