Based on the comments my FA and SA made, I think I may have to front-load my grade 8 students a lot more than I expected. This is definitely the homework I need to learn for the remaining few weeks.

1. Mock Trial
It was my first time to organize a mock trial. I was setting the mock trial up as a vehicle to get students think in the perspective of the characters. It was also a way for them to think about this question: could violence ever be justified?
I allowed my students to pick their roles, so that they would be more eager to participate. However, from this activity, I knew that it might be a better idea for me to assign their roles. There were a certain boys who could never be grouped together because if they were in the same group, there would be chaos. I really need to come up with some creative ways to group the students. It is a small class, so there are not many varieties. Seeing how the students were more comfortable when they were sitting on the floor, I really had the desire to just move all the chairs and desks away. However, I could only change the classroom setting once in a while. Anyway, let’s get back to the mock trial. I did not really provide my students a whole lot of information about the mock trial. I gave them a script to begin the trial and told them the responsibilities of their roles. I did not really prep the students on how to object or how to ask appropriate questions. And both of my SA and FA thought I could have done that, so the trial would run a lot smoother. Nonetheless, considering it as my first “trial”, I thought I did a good job. I thought the discussion went fairly well.

2. Talk Show
I had my students discussed some of the questions from chapter 10, 11 and 12 in a more interesting way. I divided them into groups, and gave them some guiding questions to help them to stay on task. The objective was to get students think about the questions and presented them in an entertaining way for their fellow classmates. I got the idea of a talk show from one of the ubc classes I had. I did not really know how to execute it when I read the brief description from the textbook. And yet, I thought it was a great idea to try it when my FA was coming in to observe. As a result, the lesson was not as fantastic as I imagined it to be. I would not say it was a total failure because some students could still accomplish the task. It was just that I did not give them clear guidance as to how I wanted the talk show to be like. Again, I did not front-load my students enough, which was the critique I got from both of my SA and FA. On my part, I could have done more research on it, so that I knew how other teachers had executed it before I tried.

That day was the first day I cried because of the BEd program. I tried very hard not to cry, but it was difficult. Tears just kept sliding across my cheek. However, I would not give up that easily. I will rebound from this to tackle the lack of front-loading problem. For the following week, I am going to front load my students as much as possible to get them prepare for writing a persuasive paper. Let’s see if I get accomplish this another trial of my teaching journey.