Micro-Teaching.... When being FUNKY is good!!!

For the Micro-Teaching experience I was placed at Greenwood High School and my mentor was Mr. Michael Clark a formal National AgriScience Ambassador.  I learned the content I would be teaching at Greenwood less than a week before I was expected to teach.  That was a little nerve racking for me especially when I found out that I was teaching something that I have little background knowledge in – Veterinary Science.  That is right I was under pressure – and this time it was really stressful because I, Jenna Moser, was responsible for real student’s education. 

With all of the pressure and anxiety building up I began to wonder if I should ask for an extension to buy a little more time.  I opted out of that quickly because I realized that in the “real world” when I am expected to teach a class and have a lesson prepared, I will have to deliver.  Additionally, as a future agriculture educator I have to learn quickly how to teach information that is not necessarily my “strong suit.”  So I rose to the occasion for micro-teaching and used my resources and as a result I loved my micro-teaching experience and confirmed the fact that I truly want to be a teacher. 

I used Communities of Practice and found great lesson plans and PowerPoints pertaining to the skeletal system of animals and focusing closely on vertebrae cataloging.  The main project of my three day lesson was having students create the skeletal system of animals using different shapes and kinds of pasta.  Students were responsible to label the bones of the animals and to have the pasta in the correct scale to represent the vertebrae column.  This activity forced me to teach content, facilitate time, learn group dynamics, and keep every student engaged.  Some of the things that I had to adapt to were students who missed one day of my teaching, students who were “too cool” to do anything, students who were off task, and even ones who just wanted to give me, the new person, a hard time.  I enjoyed the challenge and am very thankful that the class was a bit rowdy because this experience truly helped me to grow. 

Overall this micro-teaching experience has to be one of my academic highlights of this semester!  A clever thing that I was able to do was to bring real life application into the classroom, I broke my hand several weeks ago and was able to bring in a copy of my x-rays from when it first was broken to half way through the healing process to help students realize how important every bone is!

In conclusion one of the most reassuring moments of this was at the end when a student wrote feedback that said “Ms. Moser has a funky teaching style.  She should teach at a good school.”