A Team-Teaching Experience Ima Sample 26 July 200x Sarah, Martin, and I decided to teach the first half of the introductory lesson for our third grade unit on North America. In this lesson, we had the students brainstorm a definition of community, followed by reading the story On the Town and creating collective community journals in which they drew pictures of people or places that are important to them in their own community. We concluded the lesson by having each group share their journal with the rest of the class. We taught this lesson to help students understand the composition of a community and share their ideas, in preparation for our later discussions of community life in the different countries of North America and how the continent is a much larger community. Overall, I thought that the lesson went well. The students were actively involved during the discussion and brainstorming periods. They all seemed to enjoy the journal creation and sharing. The transitions were good considering that there were three of us each trying to teach an equal portion of the lesson, but they were rougher than what a single teacher could do. I was assigned to read the story, and I thought that it went well. Most of the students paid attention quite well. In a real classroom, I would have gathered them at the front of the room before I read the book. I had forgotten how difficult it is to read smoothly in front of a group of people. That is something that I will need to continue to work on. In addition, I had intended to do more of a discussion at the end of the story, but it did not go as planned. I was happy that I was able to help the students understand that community is not just the people but also the places and objects around them. Their understanding of that concept was evident in the fact that nearly all of the pictures in their journals were of places and not people. In fact, their drawings surprised me. Their definition and the dictionary definition of community both mentioned only the people as part of the community. In addition, the book mentioned the places, but spoke mostly about the people. I thought that many of the pictures would be of a fire fighter, or a police officer, or a teacher, but almost all of the students drew places. I wonder if the same thing would have occurred if our students had really been third graders. One of the more difficult aspects of this lesson was keeping the students on task during the journal creation time. There was one group that was particularly troublesome. We had talked about mixing up the groups, but we did not do it. If I were teaching this lesson again, I would break them up into new groups to make it easier for the students to stay on task. With three of us visiting each of the three groups, we were able to keep the situation under control, but it might have been more difficult if we had been teaching alone rather than team-teaching. Something that I would change, before I would teach this lesson again, were the directions to the activity. I think that it would have been more effective if we had broken the activity down into steps and given directions and supplies for each step separately from the others. Some of our students were confused and it would have been even more of a problem if they had been third graders. One thing that made our activity go well was the energy in the room during the lesson. It was quite conducive to the activity, so I do not think that any changes need to be made to deal with that. I have been wondering how that energy would affect the next lesson. I think that when planning this lesson into the day, I would want to arrange for the next activity to utilize that energy. I wonder if their excitement could be channeled into a discussion of a topic or into a game or hands-on activity, to make the next lesson more productive. I will have to try that some time. This experience was a good learning opportunity for me. I enjoyed teaching and it was less intimidating because we were up there as a group. We were also able to help each other. One last thing that I learned was the absolute necessity of being prepared. In my opinion, the reason our lesson went as well as it did was that we worked together and practiced. That planning made all the difference. Back to Course Page |