Thinking on Your Feet

I had an interesting experience today. My university supervisor did his first observation this afternoon during my 6th period class. My cooperative teacher has been doing most of the prep, so I just got to go along for the ride. He had a lab for the students to practice Mendelian Genetics by building space-alien "bugs" out of marshmallows, toothpicks, flag pins, tacks, and pipecleaners. Thankfully I was able to practice with my poor 2nd period class first! I'm really starting to feel sorry for those kids. Anyway, the 6th period class whipped through the lab much faster than any of the previous ones leaving me 10 minutes of unplanned time! (I know, I know - I should have over planned, but I ran out of time for the 2nd period one so I thought I already had overplanned.) So here I am, trying not to panic (I think I need to take a class on stress relief!), and wracking my mind for an inspiring way to keep the students engaged for the remaining 10 minutes of class without looking bad for the observation. Then it hit me - expand on what I've got. Don't re-invent the wheel so to speak. I just continued on with the end of the lesson then had the students get into pairs or groups of three to think of additional alleles they could have incorporated into the lab and what kind of phenotypes those alleles would produce. Success! I ended up looking like I had planned this all along, the kids were able to utilize higher - level thinking by applying their knowledge of the exercise to their own ideas, and I even had some of the really shy kids raise their hands and volunteer answers. I honestly don't know how the whole thing ended up being so awesome, but I am sure glad it did.