Week Four Reflection

This week proved to be extremely difficult. With such a profound loss over the weekend I wasn’t entirely sure how things would work out in the world of teaching and observations. Walking on campus for the first time, and walking into the middle school proved to be extremely difficult for me. For the first time over the last month of being in a middle school I wasn’t excited on my drive in. However, being around those kids was uplifting. They made me laugh, they amazed me, and they made me proud. My teaching experience was positive and reinforced my need to teach.

This week we taught our debate lesson on All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury. The first day of debate went well. The students had never covered debate before and were coming off of Socratic Seminars. For the first few minutes of the actual debate the students were leaning more towards a seminar type discussion. However, with a little probing and modeling the students were easily back on the track of a debate. We provided the students with positive feedback and coaching throughout and I really feel it made a huge difference in their perception of the topic of debate.

The very next day the students held the debate and it was truly a work of art for me to see. Students were actively engaged and were following debate rules and guidelines perfectly. I have to say from a teacher candidate standpoint that it was incredible to see such huge improvement overnight. I felt an enormous sense of accomplishment and pride for our lesson, but most importantly for the students. Things went mostly as planned except that we were not able to get to our second debate question. At first I thought this was a bad thing, but after further thought I realized it is much better to have a lively and passionate debate on one question than a mediocre and lack luster discussion on two questions. I am sure I will run into this multiple times in my teacher career and I am sure it will take practice to learn when to appropriately end one question and move on to the next. As for this lesson as a whole I am happy with the turnout and look forward to having future debates!