I co-taught a music and math lesson with three of my peers on Tuesday December 3rd. The lesson, I feel, went quite well, however, it was difficult to navigate my role with so many other co-teachers. I felt like I wanted to participate more but did not want to take over for another one of my peers. When I watched a portion of the video (the last portion where I taught mainly was cut off for some reason) I noticed that my posture seemed nervous and I didn’t have an air of confidence, I also wasn’t able to always clearly articulate my thought and think it was probably due to the stress and anxiety associated with the end of the semester. In the planning stages I participated evenly with my peers, gave tips and pointers when they were snowballing ideas, and I came up with using the song “the ants go marching” for a skip counting lesson. I feel that overall my group all shared the work evenly and that we worked quite well together, I do wish we had been able to review our roles a bit more but with my schedule and Josh needing to leave early one day because his first niece was being born made that challenging. For the future I think it would be easier to do this in a smaller group, as then the roles during the teaching portion would be a little easier for me to have determined. Otherwise, as I mentioned above, I feel, we could have used more practice in how we had wanted our lesson to flow. The first people’s principles of learning were embedded throughout our lesson plan. Initially when I first learned about these principles this semester I had difficulty imagining how they could be integrated daily into learning, however, after going through this semester and digging deeper into the meaning of the principles I realized they are already embedded in much of my teaching pedagogy. Especially with music understanding that “learning takes patience and time” is crucial, as important and meaningful things do not come to us without hard work and diligence. Also in our lesson plan the principle of “learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness, on reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place)” was enacted as during the worksheet part of our lesson we ensured that the students would have a chance to use their bodies to really experience the learning to deepen their understanding of the music and math concepts we were teaching. I am happy that this is a large focus of the new curriculum and feel it is really important to focus on as we move forward with reconciliation.
