Week 7 – Professional

This week we got to teach our first lesson together which meant that we got to try out what it would be like to co-teach. This was a very useful experience as it may come up in our future career. Needless to say this was a rather interesting experience for both of us as we are both used to having our own classroom and having all the control of the content and how it would be taught. I found it helpful to have another person to share the workload with and when planning we were able to bounce ideas of each other and decide together which way was the most effective teaching strategy for learning.

We already had some background knowledge of what co-teaching would involve not only from our classes in Stranmillis but our Special Needs Class had introduced this teaching strategy as it is very popular in the States. We also discovered that there are many different types of co-teaching such as one teach, one observe, station teaching and alternative teaching. Each type of co-teaching has its own advantages and potential pitfalls. We decided to use station teaching as this is also the type that the children are familiar with and seemed to be most effective. Station teaching is when ‘the teachers divide instruction into two, three or more nonsequential components and each is addressed in a separate area of the room.’ (Friend, 2008) We decided to divide the children into their four separate groups which had already been decided by the teacher due to their different abilities. After around 10-15 minutes we would rotate the groups so that every group had the same chance at each station. Kelly and I both looked after two of the groups at one time whilst providing support and guidance.

The lesson we conducted was based around cars and began with Kelly briefly recapping on their previous lesson followed by introducing the new form of transport with the help of the story of the ‘Rattletrap Car’ by Phyllis Roots. After reading half of the story and leaving the children to predict what would happen next, she then quickly explained the objectives for the day. After that the children then divided into their groups. Each station brought something different aiding the children’s stimulation and motivation. I had expected it to be extremely difficult to keep the children’s’ attention but the majority of them seemed to concentrate very well considering they are only 3-4 years old. I believe it helped to only have short, structured stations which meant that the children always had something to do. Stations included getting the children to practice writing the letter C, making their own 2D car, playing creatively with some instruments to represent the noises of the car from the book and sorting the cars into different categories via their colour, height, number etc. The lesson then finished with me reading the last part of the story, seeing if the children were right in their predictions and discussing what they had just learnt.

In hindsight I found it was a lesson that could not have been conducted by one person and having someone to share the responsibility eased the pressure. If I was to do this lesson again I think I would substitute the instruments for another station as the noise levels tended to rise and fall making it sometimes difficult for the children at the other stations to focus. Overall the lesson did go well and the children’s end work helps to show their success as shown in the picture.

References

Friend, M. (2008) Special Education, Contemporary Perspectives for School Professionals, Pearson Education Inc, New Jersey