A cohort member of mine, Kayla, and I went to Juniata High School with Mrs. Morgan. Our micro-teaching experience was supposed to be 3 days in a row with the same group of students. Everything was perfectly fine until about the week before we had to complete this experience. The weather was going to be cold and snowy. Well, what do you know? The snow not only cancelled Juniata's school days but cancelled PSU's school days as well! While my hometown only got 4 inches of snow, State College reportedly got 11.5 inches!!!!!
Kayla and I only got one day of teaching in. It was a relief to finally be in the classroom teaching students and not teaching our peers who were trying to portray high school students. My class was a plant/soil science class that is currently on plant science. I decided to switch gears and teach about soils. My three lessons were "What is soil," "Edible Soil Horizons," and "What is soil pH?"
Logically, I taught the "What is soil" lesson first to get the basics out of the way. Overall, it went really well. I walked around the room just enough and asked just enough questions. I really wanted to have the students interacting more during the lesson and I definitely did that with asking so many questions.
On the other hand, I was wavering in my speech. Mrs. Morgan and Kayla both said what I already knew; I need to be more confident. I know the material and what I want to do so I just need to be more confident when I am actually in front of the students.
When we were at the school, we talked about missing days due to snow. Well, what do you do in that case? There are many options. You can just forget that lesson (NOT a good idea), wait until the next day to complete that lesson (a better idea), or you can put the lesson online if possible (a really good option if you do it right). I couldn't say what I would do in those situations. I think it would depend on what class(es) I am teaching at that time. Hands-on classes would be very hard to conduct online so that is not really an option.
Sara, how to handle snow days is something that happened on a case-by-case basis, but if you are confident in your decisions, you can help keep them from side-tracking the flow of your class.
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