Micro-teaching, Reflection

Richard Avedon portrait of Alfred Hitchcock, master of detail

During the last session we did our micro-teaching where I taught the class of five the formatting of screenplays.

Immediately I must acknowledge that I failed to check the classroom beforehand, I was expecting to be in a classroom with a computer which unfortunately was not the case. I had prepared a powerpoint presentation which held the structure and reinforcement of what I was saying of the lesson, and so without it I was flagging a little. I do have a tablet device which I managed to show the students the slides, however it was wholly impractical and didn't have the same kind of effect.

In the last blog post I was worrying over the timings of the session and as I predicted I did run over my time, however I think this might partially be down to that I was first and nervous, but that I was also thrown by not having my presentation to back me up.

The successful part of the session I think was the questions section at the end as it got to show what I knew of formatting and was more natural at answering these questions. Rather than the talking going one way, I think I may consider in the future creating more of a dialogue between myself and students as that's where I perform best.

There were elements of how I was teaching that could have been improved, I stood awkwardly and to one side, it'd have been better if I stood centrally and considered the whole room, in hand with moving between groups to provoke discussion. Group discussion was difficult with the numbers of students and so I had to participate a lot more than I initially planned. This also included some heavy prompting as a few students had very little exposure to scripts beforehand and so when I challenged them to point out what was wrong with the poor example script, they found nothing wrong because they didn't have an idea of what was right. Hopefully, after the session they may know a little bit more than they did.