03-27-2015

I was quite nervous about the teaching fieldwork. My groupmates and I were assigned to conduct a wellness activity for 3^rd year PT students. It wasn’t really my first time teaching exercise to a group. But I have been sedentary for a long time and I’m pretty sure this is the first (and hopefully the last) time I taught fitness activity to a group of students who are considerably more conditioned than I am. The exercises we planned were advanced given their high fitness level. I was just thinking, “how can they learn from me if they’re significantly better at the thing I am going to teach them?”.

We didn’t know that we will be conducting the activity with the interns, so we made a lot of last minute changes to our plan. We were able to achieve all our objectives except for the affective domain. The activity went smoothly and the students were very compliant. We gave visual, auditory, manual and verbal cues during the psychomotor part. They were able to follow the instructions and demonstrations we gave. The teaching session itself was good although I feel like there are a lot of things we could have done to improve it. We could have provided more interesting visual aids like adding more pictures in the powerpoint or showing some equipment (e.g. theraband, vestibular ball etc) that can be used for training. I feel that would get them interested because they are incoming fourth year students and would want to know what to expect. We were originally planning to play music during the exercise to keep the atmosphere lively. But we didn’t use it because we deem it best to just count during the exercise so that we could immediately proceed to the game that the interns had planned. We should have set up the music prior to the session.

               

Overall, the activity is a good learning experience for us. I know now that no matter how much you prepared for an activity, it will never go exactly as planned. There are just so many considerations that it is almost impossible to take all of them into account. Teaching (like everything else) requires flexibility so that you could still have a successful teaching-learning experience despite unexpected circumstances. I know this experience would help me grow as a teacher.