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Using Native Plant Education to Promote Land Conservation in North Carolina

Master of Arts in Teaching Electronic Portfolio

Environmental Science & Education Awareness Advocacy

Guide to Science & Education Websites

Projects for the NC Plant Conservation Program

Projects for the NC Wild Flower Preservation Society

In order to obtain perspective on myself as a teacher and see myself as my mentors and students see me, I was videotaped teaching a lesson to my Honors Biology class.  It is always hard to watch yourself as well as judge yourself objectively.  Therefore this was a particularly difficult assignment.  From day one, we were taught as interns to always plan ahead and then plan some more, all while being conscience of our words and actions.  Nonetheless, it never seems to fail that no matter how much you prepare and try to speak and act in an ideal manner, there is always a lot of room for improvement.

It was with great apprehension that I began to watch the video of myself.  I am highly critical of myself under normal circumstances and having a pause and rewind button only enables that process.  But as I watched, I was actually impressed with what I had learned during my initial attempts at teaching.  I could actually point out examples of when I was employing the tools given to me by my professors and mentor teachers.  The lesson started with summarizing the goals of the class and reminding the students of their upcoming test and what it entailed, while I walked around the room insuring that the students were writing down the day’s objective.  I also had to take up an assignment, and the video was helpful in letting me see that I could have moved things along a little quicker in order to allow more time for the actual lesson.

This was a particularly difficult lesson to plan with tremendous certainty because it involved using the Internet to review for their test.  It was readily visible upon viewing the activity that I should have prepared more questions for the down-time during which the various sites were downloading.  Now that I am more familiar with using the Internet in the classroom, I know that I could have downloaded the sites ahead of time and used them offline allowing for more efficient use of time.  I was also able to observe myself effectively asking questions and relating them to the information given in previous classes; but instead of calling on the students sequentially or asking for volunteers, I should have called on them randomly to insure that everyone was paying attention.