Lesson 1 Reflection EDUCation 466

Malea Vitt & Katrina Cronin

Entry #1

September 10, 2021

Experience Narrative: Friday was our first day of Service Learning teaching. We taught our rotation Week 1 class, which has 19 students in total. They all have different learning styles and personalities which will guide how we differentiate and instruct our projects. In this class we introduced the first lesson making sketches for their final expressive self portraits. Several issues arose, none of them were large concerns, just things to keep in mind in our future lessons. One point was the logistical facets of the lesson that we had not planned for and so it took time we had not concentrated on, for example writing their names in their sketchbooks. The insight I gained is that when working with the students it's important to think about all the aspects of lesson planning and allow for more time as without those small logistical details, there could be issues in the future.

What Worked Well / Interpretation/Content Meaning: I realize that this was the first time these students have met all of us, and it was a little nerve wracking for me as this was also my first time teaching and working with this age group. This may be the reason it took a little bit for them to interact and open up to the lesson and engage in discussion, I was focused on making a good first impression and wasn’t allowing that connection to foster naturally. I will have to focus on being more confident in my ability to teach and focus more on engaging the students in more discussions to build connections with them.

What Did Not Work / Personal Significance: After working for 20 minutes on the sketching process alone, it became apparent that we would not be finishing everything we assumed in this lesson. However, we were able to chat and spread it into two separate lessons that allow students to focus on ideation and then finalizing their portraits. I am very glad however that we over planned, because it allowed us to break up the lessons easier and in a way that made sense. And connect this activity to future activities. Moral of the story is, we learned what is more realistic for students to accomplish in 45 minutes.

Future Actions: In the future, I will take into consideration differentiation in other ways for students who do not like writing or have different methods of ideation than others as these are simply other avenues of arriving at the same stop. This lesson was only difficult because I did not know what to expect, and we had not worked with this group prior so we did not know their names, personalities, or even what to expect as far as abilities. Now that we have met them and gotten to know them a little better it will be easier to develop lessons that work for each of them. My goal is to foster an environment with my students that allows them to create meaningful art in a way that works for them and their understanding and learning styles.