This was probably the area where it is most difficult to evaluate my progress. Largely because I have not had any specific feedback from students about my lesson plans. I enrolled in a OISE/UT Additional Qualifications course and was able to communicate and exchange ideas with a plethora of business teachers facing similar concerns.
Consequently, I have a much better idea of what I teach, why I teach, who I teach, and how I should teach. Even if I forget the entire Business Studies component of this course, I will remember to ask myself those questions.
Throughout the course, we discussed how to best put ourselves in the shoes of the students who are enrolled in the course. While completing a technology based assignment, we talked about how challenging it can be to try a new task with no prior experience. Sometimes it seems that as teachers and coaches, we have done the same thing so many times we forgot what it was like to do it the first time. I will be sure to help students adapt to their new environment as they enter Grade 9 and comprehend new technologies which may be unfamiliar.
I don’t want to be in class talking about the politics of marketing or on the court talking about the triangle offence if the teenagers to whom I am speaking don’t understand the concept. As a leader, it is my job to break these ideas down into smaller specific instructions. I really want to incorporate more scaffolding in the classroom and in my practice plans. I can’t tell an M.D.P. team that the timing of the camp offence is off without explaining why this is important and how it scoring opportunities for everyone can be increased if we tighten up the execution. As Lao-Tzu said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
Even Mike Krzyzewski spoke about how the Redeem Team had an attention-span of fifteen minutes and that he needed to mix things up with different speakers, different media, and rhetorical techniques, especially humour. In the The Gold Standard, Coach K writes about how instructing major concepts at the beginning of practice seemed to sap everyone’s energy. The articles and books that I read – along with my assignments for OISE/UT and the National Coaching Institute – demonstrated how much my first two goals for the summer are very interconnected.