Pro-D Day Reflection

On the October 25, 2024 Pro-D day, I went to the Computer-Using Educators of BC conference at Pinetree Secondary School in Coquitlam. I will be reflecting in the order of the workshops that I attended. A small screenshot with the CUEBC website's description will be included under each section of this reflection.

For anyone wanting to see the Google Doc of resources surrounding generative AI, the link is: http://bit.ly/bccue-ai

A. Keynote: Harnessing the Power of AI in Education: Opportunities and Challenges

Funnily enough, when I walked into the cafeteria/stage area that this was hosted in, I met with Erica (442 TA) and we had a chat to catch up about how my practicum was coming along. All I will say here is that my practicum is going smoothly, but it has certainly been a lot. I didn't realize that it would make me crash at my desk at 8PM, but it seems like something I'd have to adapt to if I want to keep this teaching thing up!

Anyways, this keynote was basically about AI tools, with some minor coverage on the advantages and disadvantages of AI as well as possible considerations. A variety of generative AI tools were presented, including language models that could answer questions and synthesize writing, image generation, audio generation, even video generation, and more. The recurring theme in this keynote presentation was how far generative AI has come, and there is an important distinction that AI as a whole has been with us for a long time now -- even things like "the algorithm" on a social media site are considered AI, but the difference is that generative AI, well, generates products.

Going into this keynote presentation, I already had my opinions on AI. Since I considered myself a bit of an artist and immersed myself a bit with the online art community, I was naturally adverse to the idea of AI. I also had a weird sense of pride that would stop me from AI tools at all. I also had concerns about the ethics of AI especially due to my artistic background, and the environmental impacts of generative AI were just extra icing on the negative perception cake that I had baked. That being said, I also had a belief that if the AI tool was trained ethically, I would have no issues with its usage. I also knew that it was becoming more and more prevalent, and that I would need to adapt to its existence.

I had a bit of a mixed reception to the presentation because of these opinions that I had going in. When the presenter demonstrated ChatGPT and other language-based AI tools, I didn't feel too strongly about it, but I could see the time-saving intent that they were trying to go for. As someone who has to do a million readings for this teacher education program, I know that there is a usefulness to summarizing a long paper. However, I think even after witnessing what these models could do, I would still like to keep my senses sharp and see-to-believe instead of letting the AI do the information processing for me, lest it misses vital information.

The presenter was also particularly enthusiastic in bringing up the media-generation side of generative AI, which was probably the source of most of my surprise. While yes, AI generated images are progressing, there is still a weird air of inauthenticity that I feel was underaddressed by the presenter. It was surprising to me to see everyone in the audience so... accepting? of the AI-generated images being shown to them, because to my eye, the images had this glossiness and sloppiness to them. The presenter asked the AI program to create a slide deck for cell mitosis, showed the poster for 5 seconds to the audience with a "this looks legitimate!" tone, and continued.

All this being said, I did like that the presenter was mindful of the issues surrounding generative AI usage. He was very adamant in communicating to us that generative AI should be a tool to save time and provide inspiration, but not to replace the process completely (which also came up in the first workshop I visited). He also communicated the scarier implications of the technology by using Grok to generate a picture of Donald Trump stealing Cheetos from a grocery store and highlighting the possibility that these images could be used to fabricate incriminating evidence of people (whether this specific example is comparable is in the air, but the point still stands if we consider the velocity that generative AI is taking).

Moving forward, I don't think I will be using generative AI tools simply because I think that a) people have gotten along fine without using these tools, including myself; b) I still don't think they are completely reliable, especially in terms of media-generation (and I think media-generation misses the point of creating media entirely, which is our human expression; I am aware that prompt engineering is a practice with some creativity, but the degree of agency given to the machine is far too much for my tastes); and c) personal pride-related disincentives. However, I realize that people will be using them more and more, so as an educator I would like to guide people in using these tools not as product generators, but as things to be considerate of, maybe save some time, and assist in the processes.

B. Workshop 1: AI in the Classroom

Since this workshop covers many of the topics from the keynote that came before, I will try to keep this section short. 

I feel that this workshop was much more agreeable because it took on a more considerate approach to generative AI in a school setting. It was explicitly stated at the start that this workshop will not give us AI tools to try, but instead get us to think critically about their place in our schools. My favourite part of this workshop was that it stuck to its thesis that generative AI is here to stay, it is advancing, and we need to be able to navigate it and use it with consideration. By following this central idea, the workshop went into the strengths of generative AI (saving time, translations, information synthesis, and providing ideas that our own human imagination can bounce off of) and the limitations (its lack of empathy and authentic emotions, contextual understanding, ethical thinking). I especially liked the idea that "AI is product-based, but learning is a process", because it's true! Generative AI shouldn't be used to skip the process of learning which many students may feel tempted to do, but at the same time they can provide products that we can take advantage of as long as we are critical of the input that is provided. Other ideas I liked were the ideas of being transparent and public with AI usage.

Surprisingly, many guardians of children were not aware of their children using generative AI, how they used it, or how they learned to use it. This played into the ideas of urgency that the presenter had -- essentially, he encouraged us as educators to be part of the AI teaching process. At the very least as a follow-up, I would see myself having deep thinking sessions on what acceptable AI use is in my class and school and being very clear and transparent about their use. If AI is used, it has to be communicated. The biggest part of such a policy is that "banning AI use would not work well", because it's as effective as a social media ban in schools -- the kids will still use them when they're home and not under the rules of school, so the best policies surrounding AI usage address their acceptability where it can be controlled, and educate students so that their AI use is optimal for learning, not to replace learning.

C. Workshop 2: eSports in Schools

I'm a little biased because of my volunteering background being almost 75% in high school esports, so this workshop was probably my favourite. The workshop was centered around esports in schools (as the title implies), and covered topics such as: how the presenter got started in SD43 and Pinetree, the goals of high school esports, possible games, benefits, considerations, and possible competitions.

A lot of this knowledge I already knew going in because I did a lot of the same work -- esports is a form of equity addressing by providing students who can't play traditional sports a chance at the same benefits of sports, community building, etc. -- but the one thing that I learned was that the organization PlayVS (esports league organizers for North America) has improved greatly since my time volunteering. During my time, the company was run by a for-profit CEO who tried to do some nasty things like claim exclusive rights to running competitions for certain games and charging exorbitant fees for poorly run leagues. This was the impression I had of PlayVS going into this presentation, but I was incredibly happy and surprised to hear that they have improved the past couple years! They switched CEOs to a more non-profit-oriented CEO who made the leagues free and allowed teams to play either from home or school (which is very important, because many schools may have hardware, logistical, or admin-side issues), as opposed to forcing teams to play from school like before. They also improved their matchmaking system, so teams don't have to go through the frustrating experience of constantly getting teams that were consistently no-shows, or getting teams way above their level multiple times in a row.

The presenter and I also knew each other because of our lines of work, so we had some fun conversations about going forward. The idea is that I want to work on esports at my practicum school Killarney, but the main challenge is that none of the students stepped up to succeed the club from last year. From this workshop, I got ideas on how to reach out to students, and I hope to advertise through the housekeeping moments of my lessons on practicum, and seeing if I can put any "contact me here!" posters on the bulletin boards and other announcement channels that the school may have to offer. I have some ideas for what the club can do, and I aim to bring the joy of esports back to my practicum school. (It's also a nice way to get involved in the school in a way that I already have expertise and passion in.)

Side note: I also learned that I simply could not compete against the presenter, Aaron Lu, in Street Fighter 6. My main game is Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but in this one I wasn't able to get a single game off (though I did come close a few times, which is great because he's been playing SF his whole life).

D. Workshop 3: Make MYEd your hero: Thinking about assessment and making your teacher life easier

This workshop was centered around MYEd, the infamous teaching platform where report cards are communicated, attendances are checked, seating plans are made and remade, and more. I went into this workshop because I wanted to learn a bit more about how it works, but to my surprise, it was a workshop where actually having access to MYEd (on a laptop, perhaps) would make the workshop have the most value. While I felt out of place in the first half where the presenter showed us cool tricks with the comment bank, the next topic was far more interesting for me because the idea behind that was on moving away from MYEd.

In the first half of the workshop, the presenter showed us some tricks on making report card commenting more efficient. The main ideas were: a) Using {{...}} codes in your comment bank items, such as {{person.firstName|capitalize}}; b) Categorizing your stored comments for easier access; and c) Combining stored comments into a single comment. While I couldn't get a hands-on feel for these tricks, I could see them being useful if I have to write report card comments for up to 120 different students. Of course, I liked that there was a clear disclaimer given to us: we HAVE to double check what we pull from the comment bank, especially if we use {{...}}s in the stored comments. For example, maybe a student had a data entry error and inputted the wrong thing in the pronoun field. If they accidentally put "them/they", your auto-generated comment could come out like "Them were being very helpful in class. I would recommend this course of action for they." That being said, I could certainly see myself using these tricks, because while I knew about {{...}} codes from other contexts, I didn't think they could be used in report card comments.

As for the second half of the workshop, I found the topic far more interesting and applicable for me because it covered one of my favourite topics: assessment. What I took away and want to experiment with as I proceed in my teaching career is this trifecta of triangulation between observations, products, and conversations to assess. The idea is that products are usually what are put on the MYEd mark book, and the reality is this: for each quiz, test, exam, exit slip, homework check, etc. that goes on the mark book, there is a fairly substantial time and energy cost to the teacher. Are there better ways to assess authentically while reducing the cost to the teacher? Some may argue that the traditional method of marks-gathering assessment is easier (usually because they're more used to it), but I could definitely see merit in a more active approach to assessment. In fact, because my SA's are more traditional in their assessment, I want to immerse myself in that style of assessment to truly experience (experiential learning!) the pros and cons. 

Another idea I want to explore (possibly in my long practicum) is the idea of student-focusing the mark book as opposed to assignment-focusing. Instead of sorting products (like tests and assignments) by assignment types and labels, I liked the idea of a portfolio. The idea is to sort products by student instead, so that when you need to get evidence of their learning when everyone inevitably asks "what's this student's mark", it's a lot easier because the file is right there! The file could also contain on-the-fly observations during things like class activities, and altogether reduce the amount of time you spend crunching marks into MYEd. In other words, the less time you spend on MYEd and the mark book, the more time you save yourself, and the more authentic assessment becomes. The main concern is that I'd need to get a folder for every single student-course combo that I have to teach, but hopefully the office supplies hoard can alleviate that a bit. All in all, the presenter's ideas and beliefs sounded a lot like what my mathematics assessment professor, Kevin, believed in.

---

Aside from everything I've typed out, I would say that this was a very productive Pro-D day for me! Sadly, I did not win anything from the end-of-conference giveaway draw (which included an iPad), but the people were nice and the lasagna lunch was surprisingly scrumptious. We also got some swag, which included a USB-C and A charging bay and a flat pouch with multiple compartments. I also want to note that I dressed up way too nicely for this conference; I arrived in my practicum outfit consisting of a button-up collared shirt and nice pants, but I really had to look to find someone else who dressed like me. Everyone else was in their most comfortable look, with hoodies, t-shirts, sweats, and all that. This is certainly something I will keep in mind for subsequent Pro-D day conferences, because I'll say it: I do NOT like dressing nicely if I don't have to. (That being said, I recognize the fact that I'm a student teacher who may need to make impressions. As such, it wasn't a completely wasted decision to dress up for this occasion.)

Curricular Co-Teaching Reflection

This was an interesting experience. For this assignment, there were a couple switch-ups from the non-curricular teaching assignment:

1. Co-teaching instead of solo, which presented its own challenges
2. Teaching a part of the BC Mathematics Curriculum (in our case, Workplace Mathematics 10 - Creating and interpreting bar graphs)

Self-Evaluation (Carson)

Self-Evaluation (Krystal)

Self-Evaluation (Nizar)

(Nizar has informed us that his self-assessment contained all 3's and no comments.)

Peer Evaluation (Jasmine)

Peer Evaluation (Josh)

Peer Evaluation (Brandon)

Peer Evaluation (Andy)

Peer Evaluation (Manveen)

Peer Evaluation (Sahl)

Some conclusions I can arrive at from my own experience and wishes, and the evaluations

• Generally, the lesson was very well-received. I think that there was a consensus on preparedness of the lesson contents itself, which I completely agree with. A lot of time and consideration went into the lesson plan and the slides, and I would argue that it was the strongest point of our lesson.
  
  
• A pain point once again: timing. Although the plan ended up becoming one that did not cover some extra slides and activities for each section, I realize that it was a double-edged sword that ended up being slightly disadvantageous to us. Since our content and activity potential was there, it was a bit painful to adapt to having less time than we had planned for! I'm sure that everyone saw the extra slide content to cover. It would've been nice to cover the graph on phone ownership at a school and commentating on it. It would've been nice to look a bit more in depth at the graph of our classmates' net worths and having humorous commentary on that. There were also many opportunities for student participation embedded in the slides that also could've served as exit slip material, but we ended up deciding somewhat last minute which ones to keep (ended up being two write-and-discuss questions and an exit slip activity).
  
  
• The exit slip activities were also well-received conceptually and in practice. Once again though, I feel that trying to squeeze as much as we did into the 20 minutes was very challenging. I would like to do something like this again, as a means to ensure participation and engagement with the material. At this time I'm still sorting out the kinks in my head regarding the allowance of exit slips as homework if not submitted at the end of the class, but I think the peer pressure of write-AND-discuss could help alleviate this. It's a bit like an applied think-pair-share, which wasn't explicitly stated by any of the assessment feedback forms but I could definitely see it. The freedom to apply the concepts was also well-received, and I could see myself doing it more often as a way to connect practicality to theory for a variety of other subjects.
  
  
• Our demonstration was also well-received, since they allowed student input. We probably should've asked them to raise their fingers AFTER setting up the whiteboard because I remember hearing cries of tired arms before. One thing I saw from a classroom that I visited this week was portable whiteboards for each student/table pairing; instead of raising fingers, they could raise a wider range of signals by writing/drawing on the whiteboard and raising it up (which was also good for anonymity, which helps shy or introverted students be motivated). That could blend well with this format. I think we could've practiced the demonstration process a little bit more in order to alleviate timing issues, or factored in the time it takes to write on a whiteboard. I'd like to thank Nizar for doing this :)
  
  
• The tutorial section was well-received, though I agree that it'd be nicer to get students involved just a little more. The design was that we could get every student to answer a part of the part-identifying slides, but possibly due to the classroom dynamics we ended up reverting to the shout-out-the-answer style. I remember noticing this because during my classroom volunteering in my previous math teacher's classroom in 2023, I was given the chance to teach the coordinate grid to grade 8 mini school students. I employed the exact same answering style at the time, but on the feedback paper I got, my teacher recommended following a hand-raising/calling students strategy if possible in order to get an equal distribution of answerers instead of a single student monopolizing the answers (which definitely happened). As a time-saving measure, we were going to simply run through the tutorial slides in a lecture format (especially considering that we had flipped classroom as part of our planning context), but if we wanted to spend our minutes more liberally, taking our time to stop and get student input would add to the richness of the lesson where the students could approach a harmony with the teacher as a facilitator instead.
  
  
• In terms of the content we did include, I discussed with Susan after class ended and realized that there was a completely missed opportunity to include data on the MANY ONGOING ELECTIONS, which is rife with bar graph potential. Not only that, but there is a major tie in with the field of social studies, a real world tie in with personal political choices, and very importantly: addressing data literacy! How often do you read a newspaper that implies itself to be neutral, pinky promise, then they insert an axis break that makes it look like the party they don't support is way further behind than they actually are? Or perhaps they employ some sort of psychology with their choices of categories, or graph orientation. If we had more time, this would've been an amazing activity around the end of the exit slip activities. Honestly, I feel like this was the biggest missed content opportunity now that I've written about it here. Current events will certainly make their way onto a graph unit for me. I've also run a series of daily polls for high school students before on my online platforms for high school esports using Discord emoji reactions, like this image (if you want to see more, I'd be happy to share!):
  
  
  
  Incorporating fun daily polls like the one from the demonstration could get students engaged much like the one used for our demonstration, but also very excited as they can insert their own thoughts in a fun poll format which they indeed do love -- it was one of the most popular activities on my platform! Even shy or reserved platform users enjoyed entering their answers despite their vote being publicly displayed. This also comes from careful poll question design that ensures the *safety* of every poll option, which is another topic that could come up in the creation of the data collection process. We could also ask similar questions and talk about things like correlation and probability. Lots of ideas, but I digress.
  
  
• As a last point, it was an interesting experience being paired with my partners. There were some linguistic barriers with Nizar whose first language is not English, so we had to scaffold him with the ELL-centered mindset that we learned from our ELL courses. The goal was to help him navigate our workflow and lesson planning, but also making sure that he didn't simply fall for the Socratic method such that he simply "did as he was told". As a result, we got great contributions from him, from the demonstration on the whiteboard to gathering the bar graphs that we saw on the slides. This was definitely one of the biggest challenges for me in this co-teaching activity, but I think that made it all the more valuable as an experience. Thank you Nizar for working with us!
• That being said, my personal criticism for myself is that it's okay to take the backseat if things are doing well. If we're going overtime, that's fine! Just make sure to not overshadow your co-teachers, because they're trying just as hard and are aware of things like the time remaining as well.

Curricular Co-Teaching Lesson Plan ft. Krystal and Nizar

Link to the Google Doc of our lesson plan (and extra notes that were used in the creation of the lesson plan at the bottom)

Link to the Google Slides that accompany our lesson -- we will likely not use all the slides or discussion in the slide deck, but we chose to leave them there just as a vestigial feature. If need be, we can simply move them to the very end of the slides, where no one will see them.

I am in a group with Krystal and Nizar, and we are doing Workplace Mathematics 10, specifically the topic of creating and interpreting bar graphs.

Some extra notes and context:

• While it appears that we have defined roles and assignments to segments, we plan to have all 3 of us involved as facilitators during discussions and activities.
• Taking into consideration that our peers already have a grasp of the content, we decided to experiment by planning the lesson as if it were part of a flipped classroom. This is why you might see things like "Prerequisites: watch tutorial lecture video" and a larger proportion of discussions and activities.
• We are also flexible to removing some repeated activities or converting "ask the students for an answer before giving it" segments (such as the tutorial slide explaining the parts of the bar graph) into basic lectures to save time. The lesson plan and contents were made with flexibility in mind, and we will likely employ these time-saving tactics.

Also @Susan, do you know if the math storage has any graph paper? Nizar is going to try and print out some graph paper for our lesson (as part of an exit slip thing), but we just want to make sure of all our contingencies just in case.

Solving "Copper Plate Multiplication" from "Thinking Mathematically - Chapter 11"

The images below represent the entire thought process.

---

---

---

---

I want to note that every time I felt "stuck", it was more so a matter of me being easily distracted by momentary successes or failures. "Oh hey, it's a breakthrough! Potentially!" I would say, as an AHA! moment manifested before me. "This means I can take a break, because all the hard thinking has been done!" Of course, I still haven't learned despite suffering because of that mentality for the past many years of my university career. This was also shown in the thought processes above. The other unfortunate tendency I had was that when I found myself able to just work on repetitive and simple tasks, I would trap myself into doing it instead of looking outside the box (even though I was in a position to do so. For example, I didn't need to go through the entire long multiplication at the start if I knew that there was basically no meaningful correlation).

Other than that, it was a pretty fun problem to go through! I think that as teachers, we'd have to decipher many unique individuals with their own ways to arrive at solutions. While I predict that none of them will be absurdly creative with their approaches towards the same answer, this is definitely an obstacle that may arise, especially in such a surprisingly interpretative subject like mathematics. The fact that students can't really generate the same steps in longer problems is what I suspect is the foundation of detecting whether students have copied off one another or not. That's certainly a lesson to be gained from this lesson  I also want to shout myself out by saying I did not expect to connect this problem to graph theory at the end with the complete bipartite graphs, but it looks like I did. I think I could've gone deeper, but by the end I was finally free. Unstuck, if you will.

Response to "Thinking Mathematically - Responses to being STUCK"

(Chapter 11 problem choice and solution will be in a separate blog post.)

My first stop was at the beginning, when the reading lists out the feelings connected with being stuck. "Staring at a blank page..." "Growing tense or even panicking because I cannot make progress." The first thing I thought when seeing these bullet points was the blog post writing process! In the teacher education program, there are countless tasks and assignments where you have to write in response to *something*. The hardest parts for me are: 1) Figuring out a starting point and gaining initial momentum, and 2) Not just dropping my momentum because I have an impulse to take a break. At the very least, I recognize when I feel stuck. The possible responses listed include stopping completely, taking a short break, or continuing. The reading says that "good ideas often come just when it seems most hopeless", which sounds like the former response. However, I disagree a bit here; a long break can work wonders. How many times have you slept on a problem that you've hammered away at for an hour, and woke up being able to solve it in 5 minutes? I can say that in my case, that's a far more common situation... though it does hurt a bit in a time-starved program like this one.

My next stop was when I was reading through the Leapfrogs example. The part that stood out to me the most was the idea of "specializing", which I believe refers to the act of making toy examples as a way to grasp the question and set up for pattern recognition and ATTACKs. It reminded me of my days as a computer science student doing LeetCode and other computer science-related problems. These problems typically involved a data input (array, numbers, strings, etc.) and asked us to implement code that would return a desired data output. For example, we might be given a string of characters and asked to reverse it, and return the reversed product. While a simple example (a specialization of computer science problems, if you will), there are still considerations of things like edge cases (what should we do if the string has no characters?), assumptions (will the characters be entirely lowercase?), and all the regular test cases which are analogous to the various peg setups that were devised in Leapfrogs. The typical approach was similar too, as we'd approach the problems by making our own test cases and making sure our algorithm returns the intended output. Sometimes we'd miss an edge case, and we'd need to go back to the drawing board. Lots of parallels that I saw while reading these walkthroughs of math problems.

Non-Curricular Lesson Reflection

What a valuable experience this was! Just quickly, I think that this exercise is a great one for teacher candidates like myself. I'm a big fan of how it's designed as a warm-up teaching exercise where we can develop the teacher soft-skills while letting us work with content that we're familiar with and passionate about. Please keep doing this exercise with any other teacher candidates that come along!

Self Evaluation

Peer Evaluation (Sahl)

Peer Evaluation (Manveen)

Peer Evaluation (Jasmine)

Peer Evaluation (Caris)

Some common themes that I noticed from the evaluations:

• My lesson was generally well-received by others, though there were weak points in clarity and quality of content which also had to do with gauging how much work there was in a given time. It seems that the teacher intuition reigns supreme here, because my self-evaluation had that row as a 1.5. I did feel like I had tried to cram a bit more content than I should've, which is interesting to me because it looks like my personality trait of "ramble on blog posts and break recommended word limits" seems to show here. (haha)
  
• Generally, everyone was happy with my level of engagement and confidence. I think I felt like I could've maintained more eye contact, and my self-critique pointed out that I talked a bit too fast, which was also a comment that I got from one of my past high school teachers when I taught a lesson in her classroom while volunteering last year! I think that this time in particular, it happened because I tried to fit too much in, which looks like a recurring theme here. Perhaps addressing this root cause will make it so I can add more depth to each segment as well.
• The prerequisite background knowledge made some difference. Before the lessons started, I asked around for everyone's experiences with Maplestory and video games in general. Caris' video game experience goes about as far as a Super Mario game, while Sahl recalls playing Maplestory a long time ago. This is somewhat reflected on the peer evaluations, with comments noting that it's a bit hard to keep up if you don't have the prerequisite foundation, but it seems that the contextual sections were enough.
• Everyone was in consensus regarding the materials and media row, which I agree with.

I also have a few other personal notes on what I thought, and what I'd do for next time:

• I want to say the 10 minute timeslot felt way too short (which was a relatively common sentiment among people I chatted with afterwards), but it's also the responsibility for teachers to be able to stay within the time they are given. Oftentimes, students would cite "going overtime" as a pain point for their own teachers, and it's agreeable! If classes run overtime, it could affect their ability to be on time for next commitments. It's also a violation of contract, as they should not be held responsible to stay because the teacher is unable to fit all the promised coverage in the time given. That being said, not being able to plan properly for this was a cause for many of my own identified pain points, from pacing to composure.
• When rehearsing the lesson, definitely give it an honest read-aloud next time. When I was doing my timing test runs, I was doing it silently... in my head. This is not a good indicator of how much time will be used, because (at least for me) the brain has a tendency to speed up and skim which results in underestimations of time needed.
• When I was going through the slides before the lesson, I saw Susan commenting on my lesson plan with her concerns on how much content was packed in, and she advised me to trim some of the things out so it would fit. She was absolutely right, and I'm glad I did. Initially, I was supposed to have a mention of the Cubing upgrade system in Maplestory as well as getting students to load the activity on their own devices, and my silent test run deemed it possible to fit within the 10 minutes! Thankfully, I removed the Cubing portion and changed the activity to a demonstration where one person volunteers to perform the demo while others watch, which made it so the whole lesson could fit in the 10 minutes. I certainly wouldn't have finished if I didn't make those last-minute changes.
• I'd probably bring my wireless mouse next time to make the clicking process easier on the demonstration. Poor Manveen had to use my laptop trackpad while I awkwardly held the laptop up.
• I also would've made the activity last a little less than 2 minutes (maybe 90 seconds). I think by the 90 second mark the students got the point of the activity, so I could've saved a good 30 seconds by doing this, which could've been good for taking questions at the end.
• On the other hand, I am happy that I was able to cover everything while getting my point across! The topic required on prerequisite knowledge, but by asking the students about their prior knowledge, and budgeting time for context, I was able to create a relative understanding.
• I also thought I did a great job at maintaining a lively disposition. I felt that I mixed in humour and an energetic teacher voice, and while my eye contact could've been a bit better, I had conscious moments where I'd steer my eyes back towards my audience. If I could have more of this awareness of poise, that would be great.

Non-Curricular Lesson Plan

 

For a clearer picture, please refer to the Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_NUcfaFOoRcwfBfi6coeWJLVB71fsLzg7OzCmuVm10w/edit?usp=sharing 

There will also be a slide deck used: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M58zCsDd1sdZge57mJxe_TqFElbLQjFtBAy2eNDQteI/edit?usp=sharing 

I look forward to teaching this lesson!