Aaron Hamann

Nov. 15, 2000

Martin CI 426

I am happy to say that I again feel very confident with my teaching segment about school violence. Judging from the comments that I received back from my peers, they feel as though I taught them something. The one problem area that seems to jump off the page at me in all of the evaluations is the lack of use of higher level questions. I feel as though I did ask these, and they are listed on the self-evaluation sheet. However I have noticed, both in this segment and in previous ones, that most of my classmates ask all of their questions after all of the information has been presented. This way, people know what questions are being asked and how "high leveled" they are. In all of my teaching segments, I ask questions as I go along. After a short segment of information I ask questions to ensure that they are learning and also to help them formulate questions for me as we go along. I feel as though this is more effective for me personally, and this may be why my higher level questions are not being heard.

I feel as though my use of a variety of activities to involve the class was very well received and that I was well prepared and organized for teaching. Things flowed very smoothly and everyone left the room with an idea that they wanted to learn more about. This was a direct result of my Three Step Interview Cooperative Learning Activity and the higher level question that I asked within that context.

The cooperative learning seemed very easy to implement into my lesson. I have included a couple of my resources for cooperative learning that I used to help create my lesson. The two ideas that I used were a Three Step interview, which I discussed earlier, and a Round Table, which I used after the anticipatory set. My strategy for targeting positive interdependence turned out okay in this segment, but it might not always work in a classroom. I assumed that the desire to learn would drive each participant to read their section and relate that information to the class. The only motivation is inherent in the desire to learn. This is something that I will address more specifically in the future.

My social skills may also be an area that could be improved. I focused on asking/answering interview questions and also public speaking skills, and inherently worked on face-to-face interaction. I didn’t emphasize any of these specifically, they just lent themselves naturally to the situation. In the future I will try to give some time to the social skills themselves.

Overall I feel like I gave a good overview of school violence. It is a big topic, and I think that by requiring each person to formulate some aspect that they want to learn more about, and then verbalizing it, that each person will be more apt to actually carry it through and do some research outside of my lesson framework. The positive feedback and active participation help me to believe that this segment of teaching was again strong for me.