Peer Teaching

This is Valerie, passing out materials for her peer teaching assignment in PEH 220.

On November 13, we were assigned to do a peer teaching in my PEH 220 class, I feel that this was a wonderful learning opportunity. It gave us a chance to write out a lesson plan and then implement that plan in real life. This run through of our lesson plan was to give us a better understanding of how things could go when we travel to Shannon Johnson to teach this same lesson to a fourth grade classroom. This really was a wonderful way to check to make sure all our activities made since and got our point across about the connection between balancing objects and balancing equations.

I realized how hard it is to teach your peers through this experience. This is especially true when you are asking them to act like younger children. I have found that a lot of times this will result in them asking silly questions that they feel would be typical of a younger child, but it really just feels like they are trying to be smart or make you work harder. It is also hard to adjust the time a lesson plan will take between an actual fourth grade class and our class, pretending to be fourth graders. For example, we did not really have enough math problems prepared and we needed to make up more ways to balance when teaching our classmates. However, when we go into the schools, I feel like what we already had planned and written out will be plenty because it will take them longer to balance themselves and figure out the problems we are going to ask them about.

Overall, this was a fantastic and educational experience. It was wonderful to get to practice our lesson plans with the classroom. I would put this under the Community of Learning label because I feel that our class really did work as a community that day. We trusted each other enough to practice our lesson plans on each other and then give out constructive feedback. It was important that we trust this advise and used it to better our lesson plans, in order to run more smoothly when we travel to Shannon Johnson to teach.