Group Microteaching Reflection (with Leo and Ashley W.)

When reading the evaluations, the two comments most mentioned were about the volume of our teacher voices and also the amount of activities/length of the lesson. I think there were many things I would have changed about my own portion of the lesson, but I also think as a group we could have coordinated activities better to avoid length issues. As a group we tried to pack in too many things and might have been better off only having one activity rather than three, we had to cut out one activity because we didn't have enough time, but this could also be a good thing, we left that activity at the end because it was an optional challenge if we had extra time. This provided an optional filler activity in case needed. However, overall, I think the issue was each group member wanted to do an activity to relate to each part of the lesson, but what I've learned is that sometimes less is more. It might have been more effective to have only one activity which could have connected each of our lessons rather than 3 activities which was way too much for us to present in the time given and ended up making our lesson more rushed than fulfilling. Students did seem to enjoy our activities and felt they were engaging and interesting, however there were just too many of them. It seemed that all three group members noticed the complexity of activities and duration issues in our reflections, so it might have been helpful as Leo said to go over all the activities together once we completed the drafts so we could make simplifying suggestions to one another. 

I'd like to specifically point out three comments, which I found particularly helpful or eye-opening. Yeni mentioned that students wouldn't have know there was not enough time for the last activity had it not been mentioned. This made me think of how when you do piano exams or recitals, even if you make a mistake you are supposed to continue on like nothing happened so that people may not even notice you made a mistake. The same principle could have been applied in our lesson, although we messed up timing we could have simply moved on without capitalizing on it. There is no issue with mentioning we did not have enough time to complete an activity, but I would avoid making students feel like as the teachers we failed because it can cause them to lose faith in our abilities or view the lesson negatively, just as in a piano performance if you make a big deal about a mistake it takes away from all the rest of the performance because all you remember is the one mistake. I also liked Yijia's suggestion that we could have done one cohesive activity at the end to prevent students from becoming distracted throughout the rest of the lesson as we had my game in the middle which distracted students from Ashley W.'s part of the lesson. I also liked Murugan's comment about reducing the number of matchings in my game as I felt it was somewhat overwhelming to students. When I created the game I felt using simple prisms and pyramids would not be challenging enough, but I think as an introduction activity it was too complicated and had too many pieces so students became overwhelmed. Murugan also suggested using an interactive tool, which I'm sure would have been great to show the 3-D view of an object. I think if we were to do this lesson again I would incorporate all these suggestions, mostly focusing on reducing the number of activities and simplifying the lesson. Ultimately we tried to take on too much. I would still keep the same lesson progression (front view, side view, top view to nets to 3-D objects) as each lesson flowed well into the next, but instead I would focus on the lesson and maybe have students build their own 3-D objects from nets in the end as an activity, which would combine all the lessons into one conclusion: viewing and modelling 3-D objects.