ICC Mini Lesson Reflection

As I consider our class teaching polterabend, I have observed both positive things and things that may need some tweaking. Because I'm a positive person I'll start with what I think went well. On teacher talk I felt we had a very dynamic cast. With Evalyn and Daniel as my partners, they both brought a very proactive mindset which went a long way in making up for some of the weaknesses in our implementation. I thought Evalyn spoke in a very confident and engaging way while Daniel was as entertaining as usual with very expressive body language. For my part, I thought I stayed focused, and remained cool even though I felt somewhat flustered by the time pressure I was facing when I finally started my set.

In terms of our cultural objective, I think we did quite well. Each of us presented our parts as stages of Moran's cultural learning pretty clearly. The information we presented followed the model predictably. The assigned homework was intended to cover the last stage (Knowing ones self) as you suggested.  In addition as the cultural event we were describing is a fairly specific take on a widespread tradition, there really wasn't much danger of stereotyping.  In fact, the reasons I gave for why Germans practice polterabend are all easy to relate to in a general way. (Well, from a from a western perspective at least.)

That said, there were some problems. In terms of how well we achieved our objective teaching the TLC, I would say that each of us achieved “an objective” rather than “the objective”. Each, of us took a different approach that I thought could be interesting in a real teaching environment. Unfortunately, none of us knew exactly what each other was going to do except in a general way. (In fact, we merged our ppts together just before ICC class) So in that sense I felt that each of us taught a lesson that was somewhat self contained with some unintended overlap. In the end, I think its safe to say that we each achieved a sub objective which may not have built on each other in a way that achieved our terminal objective. For example, neither Daniel nor I reinforced the vocabulary that Evalyn was focusing on. And neither Evalyn nor Daniel presented the exact same variation of the TLC that I did, which would have made a world of difference for the focused practice I had in mind for my pyramid activity. In short, a lack of cohesion may have confused our students. And I saw one comment to that effect in the feedback.

This lack of cohesion also created some difficulties especially for me coming in last. Our pacing definitely put me under pressure. With the TLC, we could have streamlined a lot of what we did to create more time. So that could have been better. And as I mentioned before, each of us almost taught an independent lesson, so overall it was quite unbalanced with a lot of overlap between stages of the lesson. Daniel's role play activity for example probably should have come at the end in the production stage where as I was still getting students to do controlled practice, in my set. But I consider these problems as stemming form a lack of teamwork rather than weakness in our individual teaching pedagogy. No doubt had any of us had the floor for the full 15 minutes, the lessons would have been much better organized. In short, even though we do each have pedagogical weaknesses, I don't think the problems we experienced in our demo reflects them in a entirely accurate way.

Finally, I would like to reflect on how our lesson catered to our student's need. The lesson plan we made was student centered in that we planned a lot of activities for students to participate in. On the other hand it was hard to see that because we had didn't really have time to implement the activities we planned. In my case I was hoping to actually do the pyramid activity rather than just to announce that that we did it. But the intent in our planning was certainly there. In terms of context, I thought that doing the role play was a great way of providing context... but maybe not for the TLC that we planned! The kind of TLC that would be useful at a wedding party is somewhat unrelated to the TLC needed to teach about Polterabend. So if we were doing this lesson in real life I think we would have taught the TLC necessary for this role play in the previous lesson.   

All in all, despite our difficulties I felt my team members did very well.  And would like to thank them for all the hard work they put into this lesson.  If you're reading this team.  Well done!