This week was my seventh hour of practicum teaching. It is hard to believe that I only have three hours left. Reflecting on my practicum so far, I think that my teaching skills have improved a lot. However, I recognize that I have a long way to go to become the teacher that I would like to be. In my next three teaching hours I would like to work on being more succinct when giving directions and providing more feedback. Additionally, when creating lessons, I would like to try to make the content more relatable and make sure that the activities I plan have a purpose. Writing objectives and purpose for each lesson has been something I have been struggling with, but this is something that is important. As a student, I often question if what we are doing in class is a valuable use of my time. Often, the answer is no. I believe that the answer is often no because I do not know what the purpose or objective of the lesson is. I do not want my students to feel as though class time is not valuable. Thus, I need to be proactive and create lessons with clear objectives.
This week I was working on being more succinct when giving directions and providing summaries. I discovered that it is hard to be succinct. I think that I need to spend more time before the lesson thinking about how I am going to explain activities. Specifically, I need to think about how I can explain activities with less words. I think that being succinct is something that will come with more practice. At the end of the main activity, I summarized the purpose of the activity and how each student performed. This summary occurred naturally before ending the class.