Running head: MICRO TEACHING REFLECTION LESSON 1 COGNITIVE

Micro Teaching Reflection Lesson 1 Cognitive

May Smith
Fontbonne University

MICRO TEACHING REFLECTION LESSON 1 COGNITIVE

Micro Teaching Reflection Lesson 1 Cognitive

Comfort with Teaching
I will admit that my first experience with micro teaching didnt induce as much panic as I
had expected. I believe that when talking in front of an audience, my largest fear is the
unconstructive judgment of others; that somehow I havent lived up to the audiences
expectations or needs. As I stood in front of my classmates, I realized that I was talking to a
group of my peers. Some may have had more experience teaching, some may have had less, but
we were all there that day listening with open minds and any critical input would be given
constructively, not destructively. As we were all there in support of each other, I didnt fear my
audience not engaging in the conversation portions or being disruptive to the classroom. I knew
that when asked to toss a prop around the room or to help list ideas, they would actively
participate because they would hope for the same interaction in their lessons. In addition,
knowing that the presentation itself wasnt being graded gave me the opportunity to be mentally
and emotionally aware of myself. This awareness helped reduce the unease I felt being front and
center of the classroom attention. It was only after the lesson was completed, and I was
watching other students present, that I found myself beleaguered with self-doubt as I compared
my lesson to theirs. Their ideas felt more inventive, their lesson plans more cohesive, and their
feedback to my lesson made me doubt if I had actually engaged them in a positive manner. It
took an evening of hard reflection on myself, but I can look back on that afternoon as one both
valuable from the input of my peers and the encouragement to keep increasing my skills.

MICRO TEACHING REFLECTION LESSON 1 COGNITIVE

Knowledge of Subject Matter

Ive encountered the six dimensions of wellness before, both in prior HES classes at
Fontbonne and as a practitioner of meditation. The ideas behind occupational and intellectual
wellness are often the most difficult for younger people to grasp. I tried to use my personal
experience with these same ideas at a similar age to understand how a teenage audience would
react to them. Overall the general reaction is one of either ambivalence or worry. Discussion of
these ideas at such a critical junction of change in the lives of young adults may seem like it
should be obviously important to them, but teens need to see the immediate benefit to adopting
these ideas of wellness. For the most part, they are unable to project their future out long term or
to see the lasting consequences of not taking care of parts of their health that arent immediately
obvious to them. By engaging the learners to tell me why they should care, I felt that I was
encouraging them to build their own reasons to pay attention to the lesson. During the lesson it
was obvious that the vernacular of the lesson (i.e. Occupational Wellness) overshadowed the
lesson itself. I didnt anticipate the word itself becoming such a focal point for the lesson. In
reflection, the students dont have working careers yet and do not often hear high school referred
to as an educational occupation as college students might. As some poignant feedback pointed
out, it would have benefited the lesson greatly to change a single word on the lesson plan to
make it more relevant to the audience. It is difficult to anticipate the views and needs of an
audience that differs from yourself. You can only partially rely on your own prior experiences
and knowledge. Much of the future quality of a teachers lesson and work with students is going
to be built upon his/her exposure to their needs and differences overtime.

MICRO TEACHING REFLECTION LESSON 1 COGNITIVE

Whats Next
There is a lot of room for improvement in my future lesson plans. The greatest
improvement that I gleaned from my feedback is that I was too focused on getting the results I
expected from my audience and I need to allow myself to move past that portion of the lesson if
the students arent interested in being engaged. Primarily this focused on a discussion portion of
the class where I was hoping to get a variety of answers from the students to let them establish
why they should care about the lesson. Jaime also recommend that I shouldnt focus so heavily
on making lists on the white board as a more immature audience could take that as an
opportunity to cause disruptions, especially since the lesson was using a prop (a small foam
brain) that was being thrown student to student. I also felt that I spent too much time on the first
lesson. Occupational Wellness, the first portion of the lesson, was the least important to the
audience and also the most abstract idea to grasp. Moving onto something more interesting and
pertinent to the audience would have been a better flow for the lesson plan.