Teaching Reflection #1
Intermediate Speaking Class 1
My first teaching session for an intermediate speaking class was dynamic and thought-provoking. Despite the time and effort my partner and I put into this lesson, I was very nervous as it was my first official lesson in a formal class. I have instructed mini social-emotional learning lessons (SEL) in an elementary school classroom, assisted teachers while they taught, and worked with students individually, but this was a first leading the whole class. My emotions were going up and down from being disappointed in myself to feeling a sense of accomplishment.
To speak about some parts of the lesson that sparked, I believe those moments were the result of teamwork. Not only with my teaching partner and I, but also with our students. First of all, we ran into our first problem in completing our planned activities within the time constraint. Before moving on to the second debate topic, I realized that we wouldn’t have enough time for the breakout rooms, and I asked my teaching partner what she thinks we should do. She first suggested that we shorten the breakout room time however, I thought that the students would feel pressured to come up with ideas in a short period. She then gave a second suggestion to run the latter debate question with the whole class instead of separating the students into groups. Fully agreeing with her idea, we were able to finish the activity without an evasive pause. The students thankfully followed along and we were able to have some good discussions going. I know that I won’t always have a partner to back me up and that part about it is what motivated me to increase my flexibility. I learned from my partner’s quick improvisation and felt that I will be better able to adapt to issues like this in the future.
When my teaching partner and I each went into the breakout rooms to check on how they were doing in coming up with ideas to share, there were several things I noticed and reflected on. I waited to see if anyone would start the discussion. As the silence continued, I jumped in and tried to support the students by becoming the facilitator. I had to ask each student what they thought about the topic to hear their voices. This made me question the quality of my debate topics. Was the topic too difficult? Was this topic not suitable for this group? Were the ideas too obvious? Is that why they aren’t speaking up? Despite my concerns, the students provided creative answers which I was very happy to hear. Another obstacle here was to choose one person to present their ideas to the whole class. The students seemed to feel uncomfortable speaking in front of the whole class because no one would volunteer to do so. I had to ask certain students if they could share for us. Two students said “no” and I was starting to feel disappointed in myself for putting so much pressure on them. Thankfully, the third student I asked took on the role to speak for the group and I tried my best to assure them that they do not need to feel pressured and that we are just sharing opinions. There is no wrong or right answer.
The surprising things about this was that I was making connections with the students through this hurdle. The students jokingly suggested that I would be best fit to present this group’s ideas and I was thankful to feel that they have opened up to me, even though it had nothing to do with the activity. The short but sweet interaction with the students helped me feel more comfortable throughout the rest of the lesson and encouraged me to work harder. This was a valuable experience for me as I was able to reflect on the quality of my ideas, the value of teamwork, and the importance of connection with the students.
Teaching Reflection #2
Grammar Lab 1
When I first found out that I would be teaching in an intermediate grammar class for my teaching practicum, I have to admit I was afraid. I have never taught grammar before and English being my second language, I didn’t have the confidence that I would do well. My teaching partner shared a different perspective on tackling this challenge. She said that she is also not confident about the subject itself, but she would rather overcome this sooner than later. I was able to realize with the help of my partner that this was a great opportunity to transform my weakness into a strength.
We worked very hard on the lesson plan and practiced several times so that our students could easily follow along to a different style of instruction compared to the main instructor. Our main focus was on having students introduce themselves. We emphasized that we wanted to get to know them before getting into any other activities. I think this part of the lesson went very well. Everyone including ourselves talked about where we are living, what we like to do, and where we were born. All students participated with their voices and it was great to get a sense of who we are going to be working with for the next couple of months.
During our second activity, we played BINGO while having students listen to the infinitive form of irregular verbs and then matching it to the simple past tense. It was hard to tell whether students were following along with the game since I was not able to see if they were participating. Here I was faced with another challenge of this online teaching environment. However, this realization allowed me to think more carefully about my future lessons so I can have the students participate as much as they can. In a grammar lab where I believe students should be fully engaged to practice their previous lecture content, I would now be shifting my direction towards activities that allow more interaction rather than just having a teacher talk the whole time while expecting the students to follow along.
Overall, I was very satisfied with our first lesson as our main goal to learn about each other has been achieved. I’m happy that I was able to learn about the students which will also help me plan my future lessons as I now have an idea of who my students are.
Teaching Reflection #3
Grammar Lab 2
Our second class for the practicum placement was much more dynamic than the first class. As the focus was on getting to know each other for the previous class, we attempted to create a more interactive learning environment for the students this week. The warm-up went well in the aspect that we were able to get to know the students better, but I believe for future warm-ups with asking questions and answering, I would provide a prompt so the students can practice producing complete sentences with correct grammar rather than having them answer fully on their own. I believe having them answer this way does give them more challenge and gets them to think harder, however, I do want to avoid any possibility of fossilization. I learned from TESL 3040 that fossilization is common in students who are in the beginner or intermediate level and that can cause problems in the future because it will become harder for them to fix the errors.
When I say that this specific class was dynamic, I mean it in two ways. We planned the main activity in a more advanced level than usual because we wanted to get a sense of how much is enough. We also wanted to see if we were underestimating their abilities by providing them with practices that are too easy. Unfortunately, we were not able to come to a conclusion because we had issues with having students go into the correct breakout rooms. For discussion sessions in the future, we will be manually placing them into the breakout rooms, so they do not have to worry about going into the correct rooms. Another thing we realized was that the instructions were too complicated. No matter how many steps are involved in the activity, it is my job to be able to simplify the instruction, so students do not get confused with what to do. I will be putting more effort into making my instructions as clear as possible.
I think my partner and I did a good job of having a back-up plan because we were able to smoothly transition into a Kahoot activity when the main activity didn’t work out the way we planned. Although we had a back-up, I believe we could have tried harder to continue with the main activity as a whole class like our sponsor teacher suggested after class. We gave up too quickly before attempting to adapt to the difficulty we were having. This is also something we will keep in mind for future obstacles.
Teaching Reflection #4
Grammar Lab 3
The main objective for this class was to review the content from chapter one of their textbook. I was very happy with this week’s class as I found myself becoming more comfortable with the students and observed that a majority of them were fully participating and seemed to be enjoying it as well. We started with a few true or false and multiple-choice questions. We then split the class into two groups and proceeded with reviewing simple present and present progressive tenses while giving all students a chance to speak up and demonstrate their understanding. To consider students’ comfort level in speaking up, we tried out this new activity called “Nearpod” where they simply had to compete against each other while solving questions. One thing that I would like to compliment my teaching partner and myself is that we tried our best to create all questions while including students’ names. We also tried to incorporate as much true information as we can to keep the material authentic. For example, we have this one student who loves to play soccer. We composed the sentence with his name and made connection to his interest in soccer. I won’t know whether the students perceived this strategy as the way we planned it, but we tried our best to show our interest in the students by letting them know that we are always carefully listening to what they are saying.
While working on this week’s lesson plan, I was able to reflect on my past experiences of being in an ESL class. I was also once in the same situation as the students here. A part of me felt jealous of the students that they have teachers who really care about them since I’ve been in different situations where I was only called out on the mistakes I made. I used to be most anxious to speak up in an ESL class. Another part of me felt gratitude in finding myself being in the situation where I am able to give support to those that I can empathize with. Whenever I see students struggling with English, I can feel the struggles they are going through which allows me to work harder in providing them with the support I wish I had when I was in their place. This week’s class replaced my busy, stressful schedule into a week of motivation and gratitude.
Teaching Reflection #5
Grammar Lab 4
My teaching partner and I set an objective for ourselves for this week’s class. We always had our lesson plan structured in the same format of introduction, warm-up, main activity, and an exit ticket to conclude. Instead of having one big activity, we changed it up and planned the lesson in a different structure to observe any difference in the students’ engagement level. I think it went well with having a video to discuss the grammar material for the first activity and playing some games in breakout rooms to keep the students engaged. We will proceed to put effort into creating a variety of activities to keep the class going as a whole.
As I learned about the importance of feedback in one of my courses, we included a slot into our lesson to get some feedback from our students. I was so grateful to hear that students were enjoying our lessons and that we were doing a good job in making the class fun and engaging. A student commented that she appreciates small group activities and discussions because they get to practice speaking and grammar feels easier to learn this way. I felt rewarded with their kind words and realized that this is the greatest gift of this profession; hearing from the students that what I did, provided them support and encouragement. It was also very helpful to find out which activities the students most enjoyed so we can use that more in the future. We also asked them if there was anything they prefer us to reduce or something we could do to improve the lessons. They were being generous and gave mostly positive feedback, but we did have a comment saying that we speak fast sometimes and is hard to follow along. I was very thankful for that student who was honest enough to say what they truly felt since this sort of feedback are what helps us make improvements and fine-tune our teaching abilities.
Teaching Reflection #6
Grammar Lab 6
Throughout this class, I realized that my focus has shifted away from what’s more important. As we’ve been trying to include a variety of activities in our lesson to keep it more engaging and fun. Our first few lessons had one or two big activities that allowed us to focus on that concept, but as we started to focus on reviewing everything that the students have learned so far, we tried out several shorter activities to keep the pace going without losing anyone’s attention. That is what we did for this class again, however, while running into numerous technical difficulties, I came to realize that many students were not able to follow along. With addition to that, I started thinking about how I was too focused on the structure of the lesson plan rather than the main objectives for the class. I should have been more concerned about whether the students are getting enough review and to check if they were understanding everything, but I was carried away from thinking about the range of variety within our activities. We have received positive feedback about having diverse activities to keep the students engaged, and yet, I felt that since I’ve gotten lots of practice with including effective activities, I should now place more emphasis on how helpful this lesson is for the students. This should have always been the first in my mind. If my main objective is student-centred, I believe that I will be better able to adapt to unexpected situations. It is so important to be flexible as a teacher and I am so grateful to have a wonderful teaching partner for this practicum. Keeping in mind that I won’t have a teaching partner forever, I hope to increase my flexibility and be able to smoothly unwind any difficulties that arise.
Teaching Reflection #7
Intermediate Speaking Class 2
My teaching partner and I had some great ideas for this lesson. Since we have been so focused on creating activities for the purpose of grammar practice, we got very creative for this speaking class. I felt that we could implement more activities that would be more enjoyable as the students in this class were ready to speak up and wanted more practice to improve their speaking competencies. Without a doubt, there are several students who want to speak up in our grammar lab, however, I found that there are some students who just want grammar practice without having to orally participate in class. We decided to play a detective game for our warm-up as we wanted everyone to get a chance to raise their voice right from the start. After that, we split them up into breakout rooms to have them share with their classmates a memorable moment from 2020. Each student was asked to share their special moments to the group and others were to ask follow-up questions about that story.
As I expected due to several audio issues in the past, my microphone shut down on me again five minutes into the lesson. My teaching partner had to take over the warm-up which I was supposed to lead. The problem was that we had decided to take on each room to facilitate the second activity. I had to type in the chat bar to clarify instruction and to communicate with the students. Surprising, this ended up being a great experience for me. Once we were in the breakout rooms, the students were helping each other out and started taking part in facilitating the discussion. I was only able to provide minimal support through the chat, but the students were very kind and understanding of my technical difficulty and even assured me to not be sorry. This experience reminded me of the Silent Way approach to language teaching. Although it wasn’t planned, I saw how the silence of a teacher provided more opportunities for the students to step up and work for their own learning. Students were sharing their stories and one of them even showed us a video of his trip from 2020. The students gave feedback at the end of the lesson that they really enjoyed this discussion and I also learned many important things from this class.
Teaching Reflection #8
Grammar Lab 7
Leading into constructing this week’s lesson plan, I kept in mind the thoughts I had from the previous week’s reflection. As we noticed that several students were not following along and that our activities were structured in a way to allow students to slack off if they decided they didn’t want to participate, we changed up our strategies to involve as much students as possible. We had a few activities which allowed students to participate through shared notes so they wouldn’t feel so pressured about being on the spot. Another activity progressed in a way that students can engage themselves through the interactive whiteboard. Additionally, we thought that a good way to check if everyone was participating is to use the poll to assure that everyone has submitted some sort of answer to follow along with the practice. For the final activity, we tried out something new and created a game for students to listen to a song from a Youtube video and asked them to fill in the blanks of a lyric sheet. We then continued on to have students identify the verb tenses used in the songs. The latter half of this activity was done in breakout rooms, so students feel more obligated to participate.
I realized once again through this class that it is possible to make it much more interesting with the use of authentic material and/or the use of common interests. We chose songs that were well-known so that students can enjoy the music as well as get grammar practice. However, we did have one student who wasn’t able to watch or listen to the music video because the Youtube platform was prohibited in their country. I felt very sorry for the student as we had nothing prepared for such situations. This experience will allow me to keep in mind that we are located all around the world and that I need to be better prepared to provide further assistance when a situation as such arises.
Teaching Reflection #9
Grammar Lab 8
The discussion I had with my practicum advisor after the grammar lab this week gave me several points to reflect on. The first thing that I was led to thinking after the discussion was my tone of delivery and instruction. I didn’t realize until the advisor told me that I sounded as if I wasn’t too interested in my own lesson. For the first few slides, I was too focused on the routine that we do every day such as introduction, greetings, objectives and agenda. I realized myself that I was treating that part of the lesson as a mandatory list of things to check off as I go. I put much effort into creating the lesson plans and I’m always excited to see how the students will like it. Therefore, I want my students to also know that I am happy to be here and that I want to provide support when they need it. I will be conscious of my tone next week to show them that I care. Another thing I will also try to implement is that we will move the objective to briefly explaining the purpose of each activity instead of reading everything out right from the beginning. My practicum advisor told me a memorable phrase that “if you are uninterested in the information you are delivering to your students, so will the students”. This is something I will try to continue to keep in mind as I continue to teach.
My teaching partner and I are always concerned about how we can try to engage as much students as possible during class. We were given several suggestions that I would like to try in my future classes. First, to notice students who haven’t joined audio and asking them to turn on their microphones, so we know that they are ready to participate. Second, when I have realized that there are specific students who won’t speak up unless they are called on, call on them. If that’s the only way I can get them engaged, don’t be scared that they will dislike the fact that I am calling them out because at the end, they will have learned more by participating. A great way to be flexible around this “calling on students” is that if the student is unable to answer on the spot, give them some time and let them know that we will come back to them when they are ready. Lastly, I could try including students names on the slide so they prepare themselves to be involved in the activity. I realize that most of these problems arise from the virtual environment, but reflecting on these ideas will be beneficial for considering students’ participation in a real classroom environment.
Teaching Reflection #10
Grammar Lab 9
Today was our final grammar lab with the students. It is truly amazing to think about all that I’ve experience from the start of my practicum to the end. As it was my first time leading a whole class with the lesson plans I created, I ran into numerous problems. Through those errors and mistakes, I know now that those experiences are what taught me the most valuable lessons. To briefly list all the valuable experience, I first started off teaching grammar not feeling confident about the content itself. From the silent pressure that continued to remind me that I need to be intelligible about what I’m teaching, I put in lots of time and effort to make sure I knew everything I was to teach that day. Through constant review and practice, I found myself becoming more and more confident about what I was teaching. Another insight handed down by my sponsor teacher was that I must remember teachers are also imperfect beings and that we are learning together with the students. This is exactly what was happening, and I learned to realize that it is okay to not be able to provide the perfect answer at all times because students also know that we are imperfect and showing that is not a weakness. I can always tell the students that I will get back to that when I have the correct answer.
A big issue I was having is that it was very difficult to keep the class engaged. My teaching partner and I frequently talked about what we could do to involve all students during activities. This wasn’t an easy task and I know now that it is impossible to have everyone participate throughout the entire class. With the additional factor that we were teaching in an online environment, we were unable to see the students and we were only able to tell some students were not present when we got no reply after asking them to speak up. We started coming up with activities where students are forced to speak up because we found that there were several students who knew the answer, but they just never chose to speak up. We provided them with several opportunities to contribute to the class, so they aren’t just listening. We also worked to create several breakout room activities and other engaging activities to have as much students participate as possible.
Another important thing I learned was to keep the class centred around the objective. To have the purpose of each class staying in focus while we run through the activities. As the teacher for the grammar lab, I have unconsciously swayed off of focus when I was stressing too much about engaging students in the activities. Thankfully, I realized later on while reflecting that our job as facilitators for this class is to help them practice all the material learned from the main lecture. Once I shifted my gaze to the right direction, I found that students were appreciating the practice they were getting through the lessons. I felt overwhelmed when students gave positive feedback about how they enjoyed learning grammar in a fun way and that the practice they received here helped them learn better. Overall, this practicum was a priceless experience as it prepared me for the future career I hope to proceed with.