When learning about this assignment, I was a bit nervous. I had never taught a class before and I am not the best with public speaking. However, after a minute of teaching, I relaxed and really enjoyed myself. My partner and I’s experience started out a bit rocky with not receiving a response from our teacher and later finding out that she was no longer able to host us. The day before the lesson plan was due, we found out that another teacher was going to host us and we were no longer teaching math, but english. This was a bit of a curveball, but ended up working out very well. The teacher that we worked with was incredibly helpful and helped the process run very smoothly. One of my main concerns going into the lesson was that the students would be very shy and quiet. If I was a 7th grader and two college students came into my class, I wouldn’t be very talkative or outgoing; however, to my surprise the kids were very interactive and full of energy. Watching all twenty of them collaborate on a Google Document together was really interesting and fun. At first the kids were having a tough time working together and the majority of them were fooling around with font size and color. After about five minutes or so they began to get more serious and ended up creating a paragraph that was very well written. Both Norris and I were very surprised with the quality of their writing.
Looking back, I find it a bit ironic that we were teaching the students about collaboration and this tool was exactly what Norris and I had to do in order to complete this lesson. Finding time to meet up and work on our lesson plan was a bit challenging, but everything worked out in the end. In addition to collaboration, communication is key to a great lesson. We worked with our teacher on our lesson plan and she really helped us to decide what was important and how to get our message across to her students. We also had to communicate with one another about who would do what and make sure we were both on the same page. One reason the lesson went so well was because we knew that we both had each other’s backs if the other got stuck. Even though the path to our lesson wasn’t perfect, I really think our lesson went well. After teaching the class, I felt very accomplished and was happy that everything ended up coming together. Not only did the students learn something, but I learned a lot about the challenges of working in groups and coming up with a lesson plan.