Teaching Practicum Reflection

Team teaching reflection

Teaching for a group of teenagers, who are in a junior high level wouldn’t be my hard time. However, I used to teach my students in their first language along with some speaking and listening practice in the target language, especially when I was instructing them the grammatical sentences and vocabulary parts. Most of time, I just need to follow my pace. If I was behind the schedule I set in the beginning of the lesson, I just needed to catch up the schedule while next class was proceeding. Then, I am familiar with my students a lot, so I would pay more attention to those who can’t follow what I taught. However, this time, Nicole and I needed to finish a lesson within an hour and we needed to design a whole new lesson plan, and a worksheet from scratch, which are not just “a piece of cake” for us to complete. Therefore, it’s natural to meet some challenge while we were proceeding the team teaching lesson.

    In the very beginning, we conducted the lesson with a warm up activity. To cultivate their motivation in the lesson, we asked students to guess what the landmarks are and where the landmarks are by showing them some real pictures around the world. However, we forgot that for some students, maybe some children, it would be also a hard time for them to know what they are in Chinese. For some children, they don’t have some much background knowledge about the world so far. It’s no wonder some students could just keep silent and seeing other peers raising their hands. However, some students were eager to answering the questions. From the little part of warm up, I could also found a hung gap of English proficiency between students, even though the cram school has already grouped the group of students.

     Besides, there is still a situation which could satisfy Nicole and me a lot. While we were stimulating students’ motivation by asking some questions about traveling, most of the students could answer actively and enthusiastically. No matter they want to get a positive feedback, which is an intrinsic motivation, or want to get more points, which is an extrinsic motivation, they all reveal their enthusiasm in the class. As an English teacher, it’s really a pleasure time to see children enjoy during the class.

Secondly, in terms of dividing students into group, we just divided students into two groups according to their seats conveniently. We found that we didn’t group our students in heterogeneous way because we had no access to their learning performance.

    Third, we moved on our vocabulary teaching part. To ensure the implement of communicative approach, I gave them English explanation of each new target words. After giving English explanations, I also ask them to guess the meaning from the context on the material. Then, students would want to tell Nicole and me the meaning of each vocabulary in their native language, which is Chinese. However, we are wondering, the use of native language is equal to communicative approach? Does teaching based on communicative approach means we should engage our students in a whole- English environment? What’s more, we are still thinking is there a more effective way to teach vocabulary to intrigue students’ learning interesting?

    Fourth, in terms of reading teaching part, in our original plan, we want to follow the concept of top-down reading strategies. From the theoretical framework, we know it’s an optimal strategy to lead students’ attention from macro to micro perspectives, which are to lead them from general to detailed points of the reading part gradually. Also, I tend to teach my students in based on an explicit instruction, which directly give them my explanation by explicitly giving some teaching techniques, such as using contextualize cues or visualizations. However, in the long run, I just found I asked students a series of bottom-up questions and lead them to pay too much attention to the details in the content of the reading.

    In the end of my reflection, I need to mention that time control is always a global issue for all educators. What we want to present to our students are too ambitious, and we cannot control our time as the schedule arranged. Therefore, we shorten our activity part, which is the optimal time for students to produce English in an authentic context, to make our schedule could go as we arranged in the beginning. However, we still delay about ten minutes. In fact, I felt a little disappointed since one child needed to go home on time. Therefore, he left first while we were just proceeding our activity part. Time control is still an important issue I need to get it under control while I am proceeding my class next time.

     Usually, I feel fortunate I have learned English and I am interested in learning English. I cannot imagine if I don’t know English how I can survive in the world. Therefore, I want to pass the belief down to my students to make students feel they are fortunate enough to have chance to get along with English. I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to improve my teaching skills again and hope I can be enthusiastic and professional English in the near future.