Educational Psychology In-class Teaching Reflection

         My partner for my in-class teaching experience was Ellie Campbell. One of the biggest strengths of the experience was that my partner and I cooperated so well together. We were able to work independently before we met to come up with ideas on our own about our subject and interesting ways to present it to the class and then when we met together our ideas collaborated and we were able to come up with more ideas together. The subject we were assigned to present to the class was “Cognitive Development & Language” and we presented to the class Piaget’s cognitive theory of development. Another strength of my presentation was that I implemented the use of many videos to explain concepts and present examples of behaviors. Since it was impossible to bring in a child to demonstrate conservation or egocentrism, we used videos of children to show these. I think that this was most beneficial for the class to understand the concepts. A weakness that I noticed that our presentation had was that we did not have a very interesting attention getter or anticipatory set. In another class we discussed the importance of this and getting students minds ready for a lesson and I feel like our presentation lacked this. If I were to present again I would include an activity to preface what would be taught later. I think that this would improve the presentation. The educational psychology principles that I tried to incorporate in my teaching was implementing several areas of Bloom’s taxonomy. We had the class analyze what they saw in the short movie clips in small table groups and they then applied their knowledge and understanding of the concepts by presenting the information to the class or creating word maps using vocabulary explained. We used aspects of informational processing theory to help the class remember the important concepts we tried to teach, we showed the class how to categorize and group new information using charts we gave them and also charts they created themselves. We modeled chunking to the class and I think this also helped them to remember what was taught. I really feel confident about the lesson Ellie and I taught the class. I feel like the concepts we concentrated on were explained effectively and in a way in which the class will remember.