Assignment 3A

Introduction

For assignment 3A I chose to teach day one, Monday, of my five day teaching plan. In my teaching plan, week three revolves around learning to set and pass the volleyball; the prior week would have focused on bumping and passing the volleyball. Monday of my five day teaching plan focuses on a review of bumping to start the class followed by an introduction on how to set a volleyball. The group that I used for the assignment was a group of high school football players that are on the team that I coach.

 

My Lesson

To start the class I took the group of students into the gym where the class would normally be held. I started by acting like the bell rang and having them come in and head to the locker room; here we fast forwarded because they didn't need to change. After this they sat in alphabetical order on the bench while I simulated to take roll and interact with the students. Following the completion of roll I then collected the class attention so that I could explain the lesson for the day and what expectations for the class were. Here I began by discussing what had been covered in the past week through group discussion. Once the students minds had been refreshed with prior material I decided that it was time to introduce the "set." First, in order to get a gauge of where the students were, knowledge wise, I decided to give a short answer pre-assessment. The assessment covered the topic of the volleyball set and how to pass and receive. Once the assessments were completed and collected, I then split the class into groups so that I could then demonstrate the proper technique to setting a volleyball. My reasoning behind splitting the groups up prior to the demonstration was so that the groups could go straight into practicing and not be shown something only to forget it while waiting to splits the groups; I just feel like this flows better. Once the demonstration was over the students then had three activities that they would be participating in for 10 minutes each. The activities, which were called Lightning, Bump Count, and Set Count, were all based off the idea of getting the students moving while making sure that they gained knowledge on how to set a volleyball. While the students participated in the activities I walked around making sure to guide the students in the right direction and while doing this I also pulled aside individual groups to assess their knowledge of the game of volleyball and the skill of setting.  I like to do this in groups because of the sizes of most physical education classes; it can be difficult to have a discussion with 50 other students and it is much easier to discuss with 5-8 students.  From here the students completed their activities and rotated every 10 minutes off of my call.  Following the activities I gathered all of the students by having them sit back on the bench so that we could close the class out for the day.  Here I repeated the main points from the day and allowed the student’s to share anything that they felt was important and that was the end of the day.

 

*** I would have had the students warm up following roll but do to it not being a real P.E. class I left that portion out.

 

Reflection

            When reflecting on the lesson after actually instructing it, I can say that it does have enough planning in order to fill up the class period and to defeat lag time.  The whole time during my instruction each little area piggy backed off the other where there was nice transitions.  I would say that one thing that helped me out a lot was having lesson planned this prior to instruction and not just making it up on the fly.  Creating a plan and being able to visualize it before actually instructing it I feel is a major benefiting factor to teaching and I would say that most great teachers probably do this. 

 

One thing that I would change about the instruction was the order which I gave the pre-assessment.  I gave it to the students when they came back from getting dressed and what I should have done was have them come into class and take it before getting dressed.  This would have worked a lot smoother because then when they went to change I would have had to skim through some of the answers. 

 

Something that I enjoyed during this experience was putting the plan to action.  This is probably because I am a coach and like to see the preparation turn into real life.  The students also make it great.  Being able to see the so called “light bulbs” turn on is a great feeling.  Overall it was a great experience.