Like Naomi, I also felt a little bit out of my element presenting a lesson as I had taught it, and probably would teach it in the future, without actually teaching it. I wasn’t sure how much emphasis to place on the why behind my choices as opposed to the methods/activities themselves. Looking back, it seems that I spent most of my twenty minutes explaining the activities and just a few minutes explaining my rationale. My goal was to share what I think is an effective way of teaching “Barbie Doll” with my classmates, but I don’t think that my presentation really met that goal.

My original idea had been to video tape my “run-through” of the lesson with my colleagues AP literature class. I wanted to then edit the film into a ten or fifteen minute showcase of the strategies I used in the classroom, and use the rest of my presentation time to explain why I chose certain activities and share some reflections with our class. Because I was unable to recruit my film student/cameraman early enough, I was unable to follow through with this plan. If I were asked to do a similar presentation again, I would make sure to plan the filming ahead of time. I think the film would have much more clearly and quickly demonstrated the results I wanted to share about my lesson.

Though creating the lesson and writing the plan itself was a very useful activity for me, I don’t feel like the presentation was as much of a success. I don’t feel like I clearly expressed my intentions or gave a clear idea of how much time and effort I had spent developing and revising my plans. I think it would have been more successful if I had made copies of the plans and handouts to give to all of my classmates, so that they could look back over the entire lesson after class. For those students who did do that, I feel like that was very helpful; it helped me fill in the blanks for those items we didn’t have time to cover during the presentation.