The best lesson I have taught so far
As it is coming to the end of the Autumn term, I wanted to
highlight my best lesson so far. I was about to start a very interesting double
lesson, when the projector stopped working two minutes before my observer came
into my lesson!
One of the students asked me “how can you teach, Miss, without
the projector?” I simply answered: “think about thousands of years ago,
teachers did not have projectors, but they did a brilliant job, so just follow
me and I will show you how!” It felt like performing a play without a script. I
didn’t even fully know the plot myself, but I was excited to see where this
could lead.
This was a lesson on BIDMAS for Year 7. I quickly copied the
learning objective and starter exercises onto the whiteboard from my laptop, and
the students started with that quietly. After that, I started a game of
randomly asking some students to stand up and shout out some numbers. I then linked
them using different operations. I wrote BIDMAS on the board as large as I
could. I consistently referred back to it so the students were really focused
on mastering BIDMAS.
I managed to get through all of the content in my PPT
without a projector. The class was amazingly focused. From time to time, I gave
them discussion tasks linked to real life examples using BIDMAS. For example,
why do we do the brackets first? We used a shopping trip analogy – we get the
unit prices of different items first and then multiply it by the same quantity
we are buying. I asked them to draw pictures and make questions to show where
the bracket should go. I was thinking about all the CPDs we had from scholar
events, and the different video clips came into my mind to inspire me to make
the interaction and learning more interesting. I also used the materials I
prepared from NRICH resources (introduced by a scholar event), and that went incredibly
well. They were more focused than other classes I had when using the projector.
Some more able students were stretched
to a very high level of algebraic thinking.
I remember as the students were leaving the class, they were
saying “that was the most fun lesson I ever had!” I was so proud that my
observer was impressed with how I calmly dealt with the projector not working
and transformed the session into a creative fun lesson, showing the classic art
of teaching. Teachers have the ability to teach anytime, anywhere, and if
necessary without any technology!
By Yun Liu