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Micro-Teaching Reflections

Micro-teaching in a three teacher team proved to be very challenging, particularly with the short time restraint.

In the feedback forms, we received are largest proportion of criticism in content and timing. The two are inter-related as we made errors in estimating how much time each activity would take. The first segments of the lesson took much more time than anticipated, particularly reviewing and explaining an earlier concept from a hypothetical previous lesson. (Our students weren’t sure how to respond.) A helpful comment noted that that we could have done a review as an entire class, rather than a peer activity. In hindsight, perhaps a conceptual review rather than a calculation would have sufficed. A positive comment we received was that we distinguished between simple and compound interest concepts well, although I can definitely think of better ways (noted below.)

The difficulty in this situation was then to adapt the plan on the spot. A possible adaptation was to scrap the worksheets and work together on the board using visual representations/manipulatives. This might work better if the team consisted of a leader among teachers to make such decisions. In our scenario, we decided to try squeeze the remaining planned eight minutes into four minutes.

Further improvements to make to this lesson:
Simpler numbers. My goal to use real-life scenario and figures could have been saved for a later lesson, after the topic was already presented with more “approachable” numbers.
Visuals. pictorials to represent terms/concepts such as the principal term, and the interest rate. comparing simple and compound interest concepts.

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