History and lessons

This week in class, we had a lot of information presented to us about the history of CF and their problems stemming from what happened in 2010.  This information was very informative and it helps to understand what happened in the past so as to better understand what is happening now and why people feel the way they do about it.  I want to say more about this but I just am having trouble formulating how to say it in a way that doesn’t come out as judgmental or too sympathetic towards either side.  I will use the rest of this blog to talk about the second half of the class which was on lesson planning, but I wanted to touch on this issue a little because I feel it was very important and informative.

The second part of the class was devoted to lesson planning.  Two co-teacher and the Dean of Pedagogy came into the class and demonstrated how they plan a lesson, by planning the lesson in front of us.  This I felt was extremely helpful.  I feel that this type of fish bowl exercise would have been something that would have made doing microteaching in 406 easier.  In the future, it would be great if secondary education students were exposed to this sooner.  We are told to do lesson plans and the parts are explained to us but we then go off and try to do it without any true understanding of what we are doing.  This presentation was amazing as it really showed us what steps to take and how to question our planning.  It also showed that veteran teachers also fall into the trap of getting too bogged down in the details of an activity and have to be brought back to the lesson plan.  The example also shows the value of co-teaching and having a third party help you in planning to bring you back to the central task when you go off on a tangent.  All in all I am extremely glad we had this presentation in our class.