Rohan Mody ’22, a current GWTeach student, is teaching 9th grade Biology in Classroom Interactions. He is a Neuroscience major with a Pre-Med concentration.
Mr. Mody's interest in teaching stems from enjoying the experiences he has had working with kids growing up. He has been a swim instructor at his local camp for years and the summer time is his favorite season for that particular reason! Mr. Mody was also inspired by his phenomenal teachers who have influenced his decision in pursuing the GWTeach program. His favorite teaching experience so far has been in Classroom Interactions, which is a GWTeach course where GW students begin to design lessons without partner teachers and grasp a feel on how they would independently navigate their own classroom. Mr. Mody's class has been super interactive and the content contains one of his favorite parts of high school biology.
In Classroom Interactions, he experienced quite a bit of success with his 9th grade students! He remembers that while teaching transcription and translation over two class periods, the students were engaged with full participation. The class periods went by incredibly quickly with all the fun they were having. Mr. Mody enjoyed having the power to structure his own lesson, looking at the content from a macro scale perspective for one class and moving onto a micro scale view for the second. His favorite lesson in Classroom Interactions was the second day of his 2-day teach. He started off with a Kahoot! review of the concepts that the class had covered from the first day. The students loved having the opportunity to be competitive with one another as well as reviewing at the same time. Then, Mr. Mody demonstrated how to solve transcription and translation problems from written out DNA strands. He used the "I do, We do, You do" method of problem solving so that students were able to work on more and more problems until they could solve the problems independently.
With success, there comes some obstacles along the way. Mr. Mody has experienced some of those challenges specifically with technical aspects of teaching online. For example, teaching material that would generally be written on a white board are significantly harder to work with online. To overcome this obstacle, he utilized Google Jamboard so that he could demonstrate how to solve problems in a more efficient and interactive way!
From his experiences so far, Mr. Mody exclaims that he has learned so much, especially with how detailed lesson plans need to be. He also has gained skills on how to be flexible because teaching in the virtual environment can be full of surprises! Mr. Mody will take all these experiences and cherish them for his future endeavors.