Peer Teaching

A few days ago, I completed my peer teaching session as part of my Movement Studies 3 assessment.  For this, our task was to lead a 15 minute session for 3 of our peers.  The session was to be drawn upon our personal interests from the module.  My session was called 'A Shift in Weight' and focused on the last three movement patterns we'd been working on, Homologous, Homolateral and Contralateral.  I decided to create a lesson plan for a 90 minute long lesson where my 15 minutes would sit.

In creating my lesson plan, I asked myself what my perfect lesson would be and I picked out what I enjoy most from sessions that I've experienced both at Coventry University and in other classes.  I came up with the following structure for my lesson.

In the Experiential Anatomy classes, we tend to do a lot of improvised scores and partner graphics, so in my 15 minute session I decided to do something a little different.  I taught my peers a short phrase and asked them to find moments that highlight the 3 movement patterns we were working with.

My personal aim for this session was to remember who I was teaching.  I have 8 years worth of experience teaching children so I needed to remember that my peers already knew a lot and I didn't need to go back to basics.

I feel like my session went well.  It went by very quickly and I felt like I wanted to teach the entire session, not just 15 minutes of it.  I tried my best to remember who I was teaching but maybe this didn't come across as well because my feedback was to continue working with this further.  In terms of the content of my sessions, the feedback I received was good.  I knew that doing a phrase based session was going to be a bit risky but it's something I would enjoy experiencing and enjoy teaching.  I feel like it was a nice change to the partner graphics and improvisation of my peers' sessions. 

If I were to lead the session again, I would like a slightly larger group to work with.  I would also ask more questions are the participants' experiences and get them to investigate and find answers by themselves.