Lesson Reflection

My partner Chris Trenfield and I Prepared and taught a lesson on the inaugural speech of former president John F. Kennedy. As it worked out, we were the first group to teach which was good and bad. The class (students) was given behavior cards so we had to deal with discipline prolems for most of the class. In our preperation, we did not anticipate the behavior being as bad as it was. I think if we would have observed a few groups, we would have been better prepared to deal with the students. The best part about going first was that we got the second best behavior out of the students. I think only the last group had students that were more tame than our students. That was only the advantage for us going first.
The objective of our lesson was to get the students to listen to and answer questions about the JFK speech. We podcasted the speech ourselves for the students to listen to which didnt turn out the way we expected. First, we had trouble loading the podcast and then i think we played it too long. The students got bored listening to the long speech and that's when the behaviors stared to get out of control. Even with the students acting up, we did get through the speech and to the questions we had prepared. Although the lesson was derailed a little by the behavior problems, we did get to assess some of the students who actually listened to the speech from the questions that they answered.
I think the lesson could have been more effective had we first had a behavior plan set before hand. I also believe that if we would have shorten the podcast and got the students more involved with either a game or video we could have had a better lesson. All in all the lesson was good. It was well planned out and with minor changes and regular behavior the students I believe would have learned somthing. With that said, I do remember one of the students responding to the part of the speech when JFK says, "ask not what your country can do for you; ask what can you do for your country" by asking " is that where that came from?" So even though they were acting like kids, we did teach something to actual college students and I think we can be proud of that.