John Redding 4/26/2012 Critical Reflection of Teaching Experience This semester, my teaching experience was unique, to say the

least. My cooperating teacher was out for most of the semester due to her husbands illness. This meant that we were, as she put it, thrown into the fire, almost from the first day we were in class. I think this experience actually strengthened us as teachers, because we were able to get real classroom experience. It also opened my eyes to the struggles that substitute teachers face. My fellow observers and I were at times confused and frustrated with the assignments put forward by our teacher, but I really think we did a good job of pulling together and teaching meaningful lessons anyway. Our substitute talked often about the difficulties that can arise when the main teacher is out of school for an extended period of time. This taught me to be careful to have explicit lesson plans and alternate substitute plans if needed when I am in my own classroom to make my substitutes job easier. At the beginning of the year, I was really skeptical of our cooperating teachers teaching methods, and Im still not sure that I completely agree with her, but I cant argue the fact that she has some very interesting and innovative methods. One problem I saw over the course of the semester was her reliance on a website called Edmodo to collect both classwork and homework. This resulted in her largely leaving them with long periods of time that they were allowed to work online. Of course, given the fact that they were allowed so much time to work independently on the computers, this also left them plenty of time to get distracted by music videos, games, and other off-topic distractions. I found it difficult to enforce a focus on each days assignment when the students knew it wasnt technically due until the next day. Knowing that they had days of free time ahead, students were not forced to manage their time effectively. They would even choose to go back and work

on late assignments instead of the assigned work, putting them even farther behind in their schoolwork. That being said, I can see a clear advantage to using sites like Edmodo for certain assignments and as a social network for the classroom. One thing I really admire about our cooperating teacher that perhaps explains her reliance on Edmodo is that she is extremely technologically savvy and is really good about including online literacy in her curriculum. We spent each of the lessons taught by student observers teaching students how to use various online primary source databases. I think this is a very important skill for students as we move into an increasingly computerized world. Students absolutely must know how to search for, filter, and analyze information. This has really become one of the primary purposes of social studies instruction. My favorite lesson of this sequence was a tutorial on the National Archives website. Our students are working on a quarter-long project addressing a Big Question related to various music genres and their history through the 20th century. This particular lesson opened with a whole-class analysis of a video of Elvis Presleys first single, Thats Alright Mama. We discussed the historical impact that music can have on popular culture. This particular song made Elvis a household name and revolutionized the music world. This song is considered the first Rock N Roll album, a huge milestone in music, and American, history. After that activity, I showed students a National Archives web page with photographs and letters from President Nixons meeting with Elvis in the White House. This activity introduced students to the Archives website and helped them learn to make sense of the connections between music and the current events of the time. Students seemed to really enjoy this assignment. The assessment for the lesson was a short paragraph on how a famous musician in each students genre influenced the course of history, to be submitted via Edmodo, which is a sort of cross between Moodle and Facebook. I was really impressed with the submissions that were uploaded, which included

Woody Guthrie, Chuck Berry, B.B. King, W.C. Handy, Garth Brooks, and many more. One submission that particularly impressed me was an entry about the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, a group I had never heard of before. With members from China, the U.S., Hawaii, and Mexico, this group rocked the 40s with their broad popularity and crusade for civil rights. I love that the students were able to teach me something new and unique. All in all, I think this was a very successful lesson that contributed to a strong semester overall. I enjoyed the freedom and responsibility we inherited from our absent teacher and I enjoyed learning from her unorthodox teaching methods. I would have never thought that I could justify teaching an entire quarter, half the total time of instruction for 8th grade social studies, purely about music, but my cooperating teacher found a way to include research skills, group collaboration, 20th century U.S. history, and culturally-relevant teaching in an interesting and multidisciplinary package. I really appreciated her noncorformist approach and look forward to making improvements to the flaws Ive identified in my own classroom.