Feedback is so useful and helpful!

I had my first observation last week, I chose to teach a science lesson because it was the next lesson in the unit and I had already taught the previous lesson from the unit. I was extremely nervous to teach this lesson because it involved careful classroom management because there were many components of the lessons and it could get pretty chaotic. I felt the lesson went really well and I was really happy with it, after the lesson my field instructor sat down to give me feedback and tell me what she observed.

Some of her feedback included when asking a question of the students make sure to give wait time so students can process the question and it will allow more students to be able to answer. I decided to make wait time my next goal for the next lesson that I would teach. I taught a math lesson this past week and every time I asked a question I said lets give everyone a chance to think about it, so take some time to think and then raise your hand. This method seemed to work great because I had the same students who would immediately raise their hand after a question is asked but giving other students the time to think, I had more students raise their hand to answer the questions. That feedback from my field instructor was extremely valuable and my cooperating teacher made sure to mention it as something i did very well in my math lesson.

My cooperating teacher is also giving me brief feedback after my lessons and one thing she pointed out was one question that i asked to the students which was "does everyone understand the directions and what they are suppose to do?" This question got no response from the students and after I sent them back to their seats a lot of students had questions and did not understand the assignment. She told me that I should rephrase the question by saying "can someone tell me what the directions are?" "Are there any questions about the what the task or problem is?" "Will someone please repeat the directions and what you are suppose to do?" This feedback was extremely valuable because I was able to make it another goal for myself for the next lesson i taught which is exactly what I did.

I am very happy that we are receiving constructive feedback during our lessons because it gives us so much more insight to how to teach a lesson and how to improve each lesson we teach. I feel so much more confident then I did when I first taught a lesson and I feel that each lesson gets better and better. Having the constructive feedback allows me to reflect on my lesson and how I could do it differently the next time or what I would change. I am extremely grateful for this learning process!