Outdoor Education Reflection

We were SO lucky to have the weather we did for our alternative outdoor education team teach. I also feel extremely lucky to have gotten to work with Tiffany and Meghan on this assignment, as their hard work, passion and enthusiasm made it easy to enjoy both the planning and execution of this assignment.

I think the biggest thing I took away from this assignment, is that no matter how much careful planning you think you’ve done, it’s very easy to forget things if they’re not written down. Even though we had discussed amongst ourselves safety things like being near roads, and boundaries of the actual scavenger hunt, on the day it’s easy to get sort of caught up/overwhelmed and forget to mention every little detail you had in your mind.

This extended as well to our actual written lesson plan, which had many areas left incomplete and we were asked to resubmit. It really hammered home the point that the more detailed your planning is, the better the lesson is going to go. If we had remembered to write down the safety side of our lesson, we might not to have forgotten to say anything about it during our teach.

I must say, I was really impressed with everyone’s enthusiasm and willingness to put themselves out there, especially during our animal game. You are all amazing hedgehogs! We also realized that it’s important to be flexible and able to think on our feet in case activities don’t work out as we had expected them to in our head (i.e. giving some of the ‘animals’ that had been turned ‘vaccines’ so that the tag warm up activity lasted a bit longer). Hopefully we will get to do our yoga cool down activity at some point over the next few months, but if we don’t – please everyone just remember to take 5 minutes out of your day to practice focusing on your breath, and staying mindful and positive. Many people in our cohort are or have been sick lately, and I just want to reiterate again (I know I know, we keep hearing this) how important balance is. Sometimes just taking the five minutes to unplug, sit outside in nature and practice mindful breathing and thoughts is as refreshing as a good nap. It’s ideal we are able to get our students outside and enjoying the amazing air in BC!

All the best of luck to the next group in their team teach this week!

 

Isis

One thought on “Outdoor Education Reflection”

  1. Hello Isis,
    Thanks for sharing your reflection on the team-teaching experience.
    I will teach gymnastics this Wednesday, and your reflection will be a great help for me to prepare the lesson. I was evaluating you so, I watched your performance very closely. I have to say that I was very impressed by your performance. You were very passionate about the lesson and motivated us the whole time. Also, I didn’t know the vaccination part was the improvised one. I thought your group had planned this from the beginning. The introduction of vaccines to the activity was very smooth and appropriate. The key point I had learned from my reading summary preparation last week was that teachers have to be flexible with their plan. No matter how good their lesson is, there could always be a moment where teachers have to change their lesson plan. I think your group have showed a good example of being flexible to your lesson plan.

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