Two demo lessons in two weeks + a new teaching fellow = stress!!! (But fun stress! Stress that leads to growth.)

The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of activity. I’ve had three group interviews, two demo lessons (following the interviews) and was told by the third principal that due to the hiring freeze, she couldn’t continue interviewing me (even though she wanted to). She forwarded my resume along to other principals and I am so grateful!

The first demo was a mini-lesson (15 minutes) with 9th graders. I could have spent 2 days with those kids! They were really, really awesome and so thoughtful and critical of what I had them reading.

The school had proposed the lesson’s subject matter and I developed these original source material photocopies for the students to read about the subject matter and write questions they had in a graphic organizer. (I feel strongly about giving students original source material that’s not pre-processed explanations of societal events and structures, so that they have to process it themselves. I used informational and analytical news articles, travel guides, interviews with people discussing the societal structure in their own words and other material that was not from a student-focused type of text). The students asked me great questions and just were so interested in the subject matter that I felt like there was no way 15 minutes was enough time to interact with them like they seemed to want me to.

Afterward, the principal said the lesson was “great” and asked me how I thought it went. I said that I thought I could have differentiated better and even provided much more challenging texts for the students to read. I explained that I felt the classroom management was good, the kids were really on task and when I saw that they seemed to be done with one reading and getting bored, I came over to their desk to see what they had already accomplished, to answer questions and to give them more challenging texts to read, in order to prevent the boredom from turning into disruptions. (Is this called scaffolding? I need to understand what that word really means).

Hopefully, I’ll be back for an all-staff interview at this school. So far I feel like I would love to work here. The school is very focused on creating a college-bound mindset, and it shows. The students are doing Socratic Seminar and when they do, their questions and thoughts are astoundingly astute. It’s a very, very new school just finishing its first year, and the whole staff are traditionally-certified and trained teachers, so I feel like being a Fellow among them would push me to improve very quickly as a teacher.

The second demo lesson was just today. I did a lesson on metaphors for middle school students. I’ve had a preference for teaching middle school for some time, and meeting these students made me feel more solid in that preference.

In terms of my pre-demo mood, I was a lot more relaxed than I was for the last lesson. Not having gone through training and needing to do demo lessons is extremely, extremely stressful and in my first lesson, I felt like the stress made me less organized. I felt better this time around and generally trusted my instincts about how to interact with students more. Plus, I feel like I created a much more organized lesson plan with a clearer flow. I also had 45 minutes instead of 15, and that helps!

The lesson started with an individual activity that the students actually told me they liked a lot. Two or three of them raised their hands and when I came over to their desks, they whispered “This is good! I like this!”

The class remained quiet during the individual activity and I was able to write the aims on the dry-erase board. After that, I tried to get the students to say what they knew about metaphors. They all seemed really reluctant to talk/shy. It’s possible they just didn’t know what metaphors were, or that I didn’t ask a clear enough question, and I’m going to work on that for next time. One student did say “A metaphor is a comparison” which was the answer I was looking for. I explained more of the nuances of metaphors, explained what we would be doing for the rest of the class and started the 2nd part of the lesson.

As a class, we analyzed a poem and a song that both use metaphors heavily. After reading the poem a couple of times, I tried to get the students to say the metaphors they heard/read. They were very quiet and I wasn’t sure how long to let them stare at me like “what? I don’t understand” and when to give the answer. What I didn’t think about and was pointed out to me after the lesson was that I didn’t ask clear enough questions. I’ll definitely have to work on that. The observers told me later that I could have spent 15 minutes just on one line of the poem and that I didn’t seem to gauge the kids’ understanding well enough, which I really, really want to do better! So much of this is learning from mistakes that we’ll make as first-year teachers, so I relish the constructive criticism they gave me!

There was one student with a lot of energy who frequently went off-task. I noticed that this student was always finished with the work before the disruptions happened, so I had this student hand out the next reading to work off some of that energy.

Overall, I felt like I did a really good job for this being my 2nd lesson ever! I do hope that the staff sees some strengths in what I did and hires me. This school seems like it has so much going for it – thoughtful, opinionated students; very VERY talented teachers and administrators; a great philosophy and a commitment to real-world, hands-on learning; a sense of democracy wherein the students have a say in a lot of the activities they do.

I was very nervous after the interview following the demo lesson. I did get a sense that the standard was very high for teachers at this school and that there was no way I could have met that standard today, even though I exceeded my own expectations for this one day. So, here’s hoping!