MicroTeaching

I taught a short, 10 minute lesson on the game Mafia to 3 of my classmates.  I used my first lesson planning technique: BOOPPPS.  Afterwards we got feedback from our peers as to how the lesson went and what could be improved.


What my peers said:

I followed the BOOPPPS planning very well except I ran out of time for the conclusion.  Every part of the planning was done and generally went well.

The strength of my lesson was its fun, participatory nature.  Everyone was included in the game and everyone had a chance to play while learning.  One area that needs work is my tendency to rush the beginning of a lesson.

What I learned:

My specific lesson really taught me the importance of the pre-test.  I asked who had played the game Mafia before (what I was about to teach) and everyone put up their hand.  I had to modify my lesson on the spot to not bore everyone, and if I hadn’t done a pre-test the entire lesson would have been way too slow for the class leaving them bored and disinterested.

Conversely, I learned the importance of the post-test.  It’s one thing to have something explained to you - or in my case have a game running while I am there to coach along the way - but when a student has to actually run the game by themselves they finally recognize the parts of the lesson they either know or don’t know.  During my post-test I had a student run the game and he had to pull together what he had been learning to get all the parts done in the correct order.  The post-test really cemented the learning that we had done earlier in the participatory portion.

What I need to work on:

During my lesson I was rushing a bit - especially in the beginning - because I was worried I would run out of time.  I do have a tendency to rush things along because I get overly concerned about not having enough time to finish the lesson.  This microteaching was an exaggeration of that fear because it was only 10 minutes but even during a normal lesson I still have that tendency to rush.  Rushing is really counter-productive because the students might get confused and it also makes the lesson less enjoyable when there is not room to breathe during it.  In the future I need to relax about the time constraint and really focus on giving a well-paced lesson even if that means cutting something out.