Lab B - Listen in

Continuing my teaching development, and after learning more tricks of the trade I was up again to teach the class a new skill. In this lesson I was to teach the class the back hand pass with a Frisbee. I definitely felt more confident with this assignment and knew right away that my lesson would be much more fluent and smooth. In this lab we were attached to an mp3 recorder and a microphone that allows us to play back our lesson and hear exactly what we said and how we said it.

While listening to my audio recording I was really able to assess my speech and style of teaching. I was able to see what words I kept repeating, which sentences did not make sense, and various instructions I could have avoided to get the students into more activity quicker. While teaching, it is hard to really listen to yourself mostly because of nerves and being a little too anxious. Speaking of being anxious, I did realize that my speech speed has slowed down much more, and I now teach at a normal pace. One thing I noticed I did a lot in the earlier teaching experiences is speed teach. This is when I rush through what I'm saying without knowing because I am so nervous to be in front of a group of people. However, this semester specifically, I have really improved on my shyness and have become significantly more comfortable in front of a large crowd.

Another aspect of my teaching that still needs work is my time managemnet. Thanks to my time coding assessment I am able to see exactly how much time I spent on different areas of teaching such as management, activity, instruction, and waiting time. Although my time code sheet does show good numbers, I could still improve upon them. I do very well with avoiding any waiting time and I'm always working on something with my students. I do just enough activity time, but could still use more since this is "physical" education. My best bet would be to replace some of my instruction time with more activity. I need to work on making my introductions and directions short and to the point so that I can provide the maximum amount of activity possible.

Another problem that I have when I teach that is just a bad habit is my language. No, I do not mean I curse and say bad words when I teach, I mean that I say some words too many times, or I say the wrong word in certain situations. While going over my verbal transcript for this lab I noticed that I will say "alright" at the start of almost every sentence. Of coarse, I can still be a great teacher even though I use that word many many.....many times, however, it would be much more professional and sounds more professional if I could cut out repetitive words like that. Another mistake I seem to make a lot is when I use the word "guys" to refer to the class. Today, many people refer to boys and girls as a group as guys, and no one really seems to mind that much. However, when being as professional as possible it would be more than expected to say the more politically correct term when referring to a group of people. This is probably my worst habit and will be the hardest to break. I need to work on putting words like "everyone" or "class" into my vocabulary during my teaching journey.