How to Teach an AMAZING Demo Lesson in Under 10 Minutes During Your Next Teacher Interview
Apr 14, 2024Season 1Episode 89
Helena Hains
Not sure how to teach a demo lesson for your upcoming teacher interview?
Here we break down exactly what a demo lesson is, how to prepare for one, and what a great demo lesson should include.
These teacher interview tips will help you confidently prepare for your upcoming teacher interview, prepare materials for your demo lesson, and know with confidence how to stand out during your next interview from other candidates.
I’m Helena, a coach for new and first-year teachers sharing knowledge on how to have a thriving career and personal life.
The Present Teacher Podcast is a resourcefor teacher interviews, classroom setup, classroom management, and time management. Follow along and learn how to thrive in the classroom and in life.
Subscribe to The Present Teacher Podcast to get inspired by new weekly podcast episodes!
Not sure how to teach a demo lesson for your upcoming teacher interview?
Here we break down exactly what a demo lesson is, how to prepare for one, and what a great demo lesson should include.
These teacher interview tips will help you confidently prepare for your upcoming teacher interview, prepare materials for your demo lesson, and know with confidence how to stand out during your next interview from other candidates.
I’m Helena, a coach for new and first-year teachers sharing knowledge on how to have a thriving career and personal life.
The Present Teacher Podcast is a resourcefor teacher interviews, classroom setup, classroom management, and time management. Follow along and learn how to thrive in the classroom and in life.
Subscribe to The Present Teacher Podcast to get inspired by new weekly podcast episodes!
Speaker 1:
Congratulations. You just got notified that you are going to be doing your next interview and they let you know that you will be doing a demo lesson or a sample lesson, and your first thought might be oh my goodness, I'm so excited. Second thought might be what on earth do I do If this is you? Don't worry. When I got my first interview for my first teaching position, they let me know that I would be doing two demo lessons, one for kindergarten and one for fifth grade, and I had no clue what to expect. Granted, I had undergone my master's in elementary education, so I had done sample lessons before and I did do student teaching. However, I wasn't sure how in-depth and how long they expected this lesson to be. So if you're wondering what exactly you should be including in your mini lesson, how do you prepare for it, what should you be including and how do you really stand out and do a really good job during your mini lesson, then stick around, because you won't want to miss it. Hey, teacher Bestie, my name is Helena and I'm the creator of the Present Teacher Podcast. I'm a first-year teacher coach and in this podcast, you are going to learn everything from simple, actionable classroom management, social learning and teacher wellness strategies. You know that impact you want to make in the classroom. We're going to make it happen here, all right. So the first thing I highly recommend that you do once you find out that you will be doing an interview is to email and ask the person more about the mini lesson. Some questions I would include in this email is what grade level, if they haven't told you already how long the lesson should be, and are there any specific curriculum skills or state standards that they want you to address during that time or subject? Once you have a basic understanding of what they're expecting, you can then tailor your lesson from there.
Speaker 1:
Now, in general, I love to use my lesson plan that I used during college. This was a very thorough lesson plan that I would use for my observations and then, when I started using it, for my interviews and my observations as a teacher, I got a lot of compliments on this lesson plan particularly. But I'm going to walk you through what this lesson plan template that I have typically includes and what you might want to include during more mini lesson. So the first thing we're going to talk about is planning. At the top, I like to put what lesson I am teaching or grade level I'm teaching the subject and then I always tie it back to a standard as to which state standard I am going to be teaching on. After that, I like to look at an objective. I create an objective to show whether or not my students understood the story. So, for example, let's say, in my kindergarten mini course or mini lesson I had to teach about if students could retell the story, and that was the state standard. So my objective was by the end of the lesson, students will be able to retell the story of the three little pigs using visuals with 80% accuracy. This tells when this should occur, at what proficiency and what students will be using to do it. Now, once you have that figured out, it's a lot easier to create a lesson from there.
Speaker 1:
The first thing I like to do in a lesson is I like to create a hook or a real world connection. This could look like have you ever tried to build a structure in the sandbox or while you were playing with blocks and it fell down, and then we'd have a discussion about it? Well, I have a story about three little pigs who built houses out of different things and some of them fell and some of them, you know, stayed strong despite being trying to be blown over and knocked over by their friends. And so from there, after I have my hook or my real world connection, then I dive into the lesson and then I also don't forget to mention, during my hook, I like to mention the objective, and today we are going to read about the story of these three little pigs and then you are going to show me that you can retell the story by using visuals and sharing with a partner and then think pair, share, share to a class. So that's what a hook and the objective might look like.
Speaker 1:
The next thing I like to do is the I do, we do, you do method. So this is the release model and in something that was really common, especially when I was in college, for my ESL endorsement. Essentially what it is is it emphasizes the you modeling first and teaching the lesson, and then you work together, then you do it. So, taking that lesson that I just talked about in regards to the three little pigs, I might do first I do, I'm going to read the story and as I read the story, we are going to discuss and answer questions about the story to check for comprehension. Now, in general, there are different types of assessments that you want to have throughout the lesson, so this might be something that you're familiar with with your teaching program, but there's formative and summative assessments and formal and informal assessments. Now, in general, I like to have three informal assessments throughout the lesson, which means I'm checking for understanding from my students at least three times. So for this lesson it could look like I specifically have three questions.
Speaker 1:
I'm going to ask about retelling the story. What happened first so far in the story? What happened in the middle? What happened last? This is checking for understanding and those are my indicators that I'm good to continue on with my lesson. If my students aren't understanding and aren't able to answer the question, I'm then able to go back and reteach in the moment because I know whether or not my students are comprehending or, you know, on their way to perfecting that skill.
Speaker 1:
So, as a recap for my lesson plan, I'm going to do the hook, the objective I do, we do, and now the you do part. This is where I'm going to model that I have different pictures of the different characters and I'm going to retell the story and then I'm going to have my students do it and they're going to do it with a partner and then they might share out. I might have some volunteers share with me, but I'm checking to see as a whole, do they understand the story and are they able to retell the story to me per our objective that we stated early. After you do that, then you're going to want to wrap it up. So this could look like, as you can see, we've talked about whether or not the three little pigs and we talked about retelling, and then I'm gonna tie it back into a real world connection. So this could be why is it important for us to build a strong structure, or learn about the different materials to build a strong structure, or learn about the different materials to make a strong structure? Why is it important for us to be able to retell a story? And we'll have a discussion about why it's important to be able to retell a story. All of that relates to the lesson. So that's a general breakdown of what the lesson plan should include. After that, let's talk about what you should actually be doing during the lesson itself.
Speaker 1:
Now, as someone who's not only taught but now subbed for a while now, I can tell you that the first thing you're gonna want to do when you step into the classroom to do your mini lesson is to introduce yourself. So I like to introduce myself by using my it factor to remind the people watching me why it's important that I am here and I feel like I'm a good fit. So for me, that could be good morning class. My name is Ms Haynes, and something you should know about me is I love to play games and I love to get my students moving. So something about me is I have two dogs named Coda and Kina from Brother Bear, and I love the movie Moana Something to connect with.
Speaker 1:
That's the first thing you're going to want to do, because the students are more likely to listen to you when they have a buy-in and they know a little bit about you. It's a little bit upfront just to start teaching right away. You kind of want to build that connection with them first. The second thing you're going to want to do is you're going to want to model procedures and, again, if you have only 20 minutes, this can be very short, sweet and to the point you can be like. One thing I'm looking for is for my students to be showing me that they're listening, and let's talk about what that sounds like and looks like, and then you can talk about what it looks like, sounds like, model it, talk about why it's important and what it doesn't look like.
Speaker 1:
Any procedures that you want to teach on the spot to show you have strong classroom management skills, I recommend doing at the beginning. Again, don't take too long for this this could be under a minute, just really quick touching on that. But that shows, during your mini lesson, that you have strong classroom management skills and that you're able to take control of a classroom, regardless if it's your usual class or not. So, again, the first thing you're going to want to do when you actually teach the lesson is introduce yourself to have some buy-in with your students. The second thing you're going to want to do is to model some basic procedures and expectations in class, because the last thing you want is to deal with disruptive behavior right as you're being observed with students you've never met. The third thing I highly recommend that you do I know nerves might be high right now while you're teaching, but when you get to the you do, we do section, make sure to do something my mentor teacher referred to as mowing the lawn.
Speaker 1:
You want to walk throughout the room and listen to your students ask questions. Don't necessarily give them the answers, but ask questions that may lead them to an answer. So if my students start talking about how the wool of the brick house down, I might ask questions. That's interesting. I wonder if that's what happened first in the story and then let them discuss about that. You want to help lead them into the right direction by asking questions instead of giving them the answer. So that's the next thing you're going to want to do.
Speaker 1:
The final thing I recommend you do in the moment is ask for understanding. Like I said three times, that shows that you are checking for understanding as you go. You're able to reteach in the moment. If get well yes score students to know whatever skill, they also want to see that you're able to reteach in the moment. That is an even bigger skill, I believe, than necessarily getting all your kids there and or just breezing through and not getting any of your kids to master the skill or the standard that you were aiming to get. So that wraps up all you need to know about teaching a demo lesson.
Speaker 1:
If you want to dive deeper into the teacher interview process, I highly recommend that you subscribe to wherever you're joining us from. That way, you get notified about the next part in the series, where we're going to be talking about even more tips about how to land your upcoming teaching position. And then, if you want to take it a step further, I highly recommend you download the Ultimate Teacher Interview Guide Now. This guide is a combination of all the questions I've gotten asked in the past about landing an interview. I started to notice some trends, so I just put all my answers in one spot so you can go to one spot and find all your answers instead of spending time on the internet trying to compile different places to get your answer. So I highly recommend you check out that ultimate guide.
Speaker 1:
The third thing I wanna recommend you check out is if you have an interview coming up and you wanna get everything done ASAP, I highly recommend you check out the Land your Dream Job mini course. Now, this mini course is of five lessons. They're under 10 minutes. I try to make them as short and concise and actionable as possible, but when I was trying to help teachers online through the DMs, I noticed that it was really hard for me to help teachers get to where they wanted to be, and I know that a lot of the teachers I was talking to were student teachers who maybe had an interview next week, or they were teachers who were already teaching and didn't have the time to spend a week, two weeks getting ready for the interview process. So I created a mini course that walks you through everything you need to know, from researching positions and applying to them to following up after your interview, in a single weekend. So if that's something you're interested in, I highly recommend you check out the Land your Dream Drop mini course.
Speaker 1:
As always, remember we are stronger together and I will see you in the next one. Teacher bestie Bye. Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode. I hope that you were able to take away some value that will help you thrive inside and out of the classroom. It would mean the world to me if you could take five seconds right now and leave a review on this podcast. And if you found this podcast especially helpful, make sure to take a screenshot of this episode right now and tag me on your socials to let me know you're listening. As always, remember that we are stronger together. With all the love in the world, helena, aka the present teacher, see you next time, teacher bestie.