When my colleagues and I walked into class on monday, my cooperating teacher asked us to teach a portion of the class. We split the class up into cooperative groups in the gym and did activities with them. I was in charge of upper body and it was a little difficult to keep all students on-task.
Part of the reason why the class was so difficult is that we did not get to plan ahead. Also, we were not as familiar with the equipment that was in the gym as we would have been had we had time to prepare. As teachers, we sometimes have to plan lessons quickly, however, we would usually know the topic that we would be teaching beforehand.
This experience taught me that it is important to have the structured lesson plan in order to keep the time-on-task high. Even though the teaching that we did was successful, it could have been much better with a structured plan. The experience also taught me how successful cooperating groups can be. The students were split into three cooperating groups which I thought worked really well as we were doing circuit training. I feel that if we had the whole class participating in these activities together it would have been much more difficult.
