Dylan Everleth Lab D

Dylan Everleth Lab D - Tchoukball


WHAT:
When I found out that my group was teaching the sport of Tchoukball, I was somewhat excited and instantly confident in the outcome of this lab. Fortunately for me, Tchoukball was a sport that I had prior knowledge of and felt that I could use this knowledge to contribute the most I could to this group project. The more and more I thought about this lab, I became more confident in the outcome. Tchoukball was very similar to handball and everyone in the class was proficient in throwing and catching, so I believed this would be a lesson that would run very smoothly once the students learned the basic rules and strategies were learned. As I looked over the basic requirements for the lab, my biggest concern was the fact that it required a lot of group participation and teamwork. The success of the lab depended on how well each group could plan together and organize correct progressions. My biggest fear was creating a lesson that didn't flow together and would create gaps that confused students or bored them. When planning for my role in the lesson, I was in charge of the basic rules and introduction to game play. I felt my role was very important because it taught the students the most about actually playing a real competitive game, such as rules and strategies, as well as put them into a situation that they had to cooperate with their teammates and perform at a competition speed. This role made me nervous because I felt that if I didn't do a good enough teaching the students, then it would cause confusion during an actual 6v6 game and could potentially throw off the pace of the lesson. When the time came for my role in the lesson, I spent a large amount of the time, teacher and correcting the students with the correct rules for the game as well as helping them develop new strategies to improve success. When confusion occurred, I fixed it immediately and told all students so it would not come back again later on. The more I helped correct each of the students during play, the level of understanding went up and I believe this contributed to a smooth and successful 6v6 and achievement of our units central focus and maximum learning for each student.

GUT:
I feel like my introduction of rules and team game-play really helped the students for the final 6v6 game. Since the students had been performing drills and individual skills prior to my teaching period, I think I raised the level of interest when I introduced full-speed game-play with actual scoring. I felt relieved at how smooth my activity went. Each student enforced the rules and performed them at a proficient level and I felt they were ready to play a 6v6 game. I was very happy to see that students used the feedback I gave them and strategy suggestions and applied them during game-play. This made me feel great because as a teacher, it was my job to teach them the game and put them in a position to achieve our central focus for the unit. By the end of the lesson, each student was truly wanting to keep playing the game and really looked forward to potentially playing Tchoukball again. This was the type of feeling that every teacher tries to experience.

SO WHAT:
I felt that the way I taught my portion of the lesson really did a good job of introducing team game-play to the students. I really stressed on teamwork and calling each others names for passes to reinforce the act of teamwork and help the game run smoother. Knowing that none of the students knew what the rules of the game were, I really tried to simplify the rules in a way that each student could remember them easily while playing. By introducing a smaller game like 3v3 half court, I think it really helped the students get comfortable with the basic rules and strategies at full speed before they jump into a 6v6 full court game. I based what rules to teach the students from a question to ask myself that I got from the text, "Teachers should ask themselves if not applying a rule will cause bad practice habits that cannot be easily changed." (Rink p92). By asking myself this question when planning, I can include important rules of the game as well as exclude rules that are less important for first time game play and could potentially cause issues and slow down the lesson.  I also believe that constantly checking for understanding of rules and when a rule was done incorrectly, telling the student and checking for understanding was important. Feedback was very important when introducing game play, because it helped the students become more competent with what they were doing. This was reinforced with the written cognitive test that each student took at the end of the lesson. I was pleased to see that each student achieved the objective for the assessment which was based on rules and concepts of game-play. This was very important to me because I felt that I did a good job of teaching this concept in a way that each of my students were knowledgeable in what we as teachers expected them to be. The average score of the class (4.5/5) was well over the minimum score to achieve our objective (3/5) which was great to see as teachers. This ensured that the students were learning during each of the activities.

NOW WHAT:
I believe that I can continue to help students with introductions to game play by coming up with new and more informative modifications of the full game to help students learn more and get hooked on the game. I think one thing I really need to improve on is when giving corrective feedback, I should stop the entire activity and address all the students to ensure understanding of the entire class and prevent the same problem from re-occurring. I think this a common problem that teachers face but can be easily fixed. As for the written test, seeing that all students achieved our objective fairly easy, I as a teacher should work to challenge the students more and assess them a little bit harder that will help them learn more and more. When teaching, I need to put the students in situations that will challenge the students, but also prevent the students from struggling. I believe that if I continue to challenge the students and continually strive for greater and greater learning from my students, I can help students achieve the best of their ability as well as become a greater and greater teacher.

REFLECTION FROM LAB A-D:
From the beginning of this semester starting with Lab A, I was very uncomfortable with teaching my peers. I was nervous about speaking in front of other students, and began to panic when the time came for my time to teach. I didn't know the correct ways of teaching  a lesson and constantly feared forgetting basic things at the beginning and end of my lesson. As my labs progressed, I became more comfortable with what I was doing. I began to remember what I needed to include and how to do it, and the lessons became a lot easier to create and execute. Lab B was a big confidence builder as a realized how much more comfortable I was becoming with teaching. Lab C was a big eye-opener for me as a felt I didn't give this lab as much focus as I should have. I was not as prepared as I thought I was and because of this, my lesson did not go as well as I had planned. This was a big eye-opener as it showed me just how important planning a lesson is. I will look at this bump in the road as an improvement in my teaching. As the final lab concluded and I taught my portion of the lesson in Lab D, I can now look back and see how much I have improved as a teacher since the beginning, not only am I much more comfortable speaking to others, but I can also see how much greater of a teacher I have become when it comes to creating, planning, and executing. I still have more improvement to come as a teacher, and I will continue to improve.

Here I am explaining the rules of game-play to the students!

Here I am demonstrating a basic offensive possession in Tchoukball in slow motion to the class!