Category: Teaching Reflections

This has been a wonderful twelve week journey. I have learnt a lot from my sponsor teacher, practicum advisors, my teaching partner and from my students. Saying goodbye to my students was unexpectedly hard, they  have been a huge part of  my success in this program. I found myself a little teary as they one-by-one signed out of the online classroom. Each student helped me learn something different in this journey. Most importantly, they helped me realize the importance of  seeing each student as an individual.

I have been spending a lot of time reflecting on this experience and I think the most important revelation that I have had is that I feel like a teacher. When I started this journey I wasn’t sure that at the end of it that I would feel confident in my new role of being an English language teacher. I do feel confident, however I know that I have lots left to learn. I am planning to seek out volunteer and shadowing opportunities to continue to develop my teaching skills, so that I can be the best teacher that I can possibly be. As I continue to develop my skills I hope to further discover who I want to be as a teacher.

As I get closer to the end of my practicum there are a few things that I still need to work on. One of the things that I have yet to master is introducing topics and material that is relatable and interesting for my students. I was super excited for this class because I thought that the students would find the topic super engaging and relatable. However, I am not certain that they did. I wonder if the online environment makes it harder to pick material that is tailored for my students. I find that despite virtually meeting with my students once a week for 8 weeks, I still do not know my students well. I’m curious if the lack of face to face communication and casual conversations before and after class have made it harder to get to know them. I would also like to work on knowing when to step in and provide more direction or elicit more participation. Again, I think that this would be easier in an in person class as I could use non-verbal cues to help.

One thing I am really excited about and think is going well is adding continuity to my lessons. This week I followed a very similar format to the previous week. I think that the students were already familiar with the major components of the activities and that this helped them learn more. This is something that I plan to keep in mind for the future. I do not have to reinvent the wheel each time, if it works, I can stick with it.

It’s hard to believe that this lesson is the second last of my practicum. Something that has become increasingly clear to me in the last few weeks is that not everything goes according to plan and that is okay. In fact, sometimes nothing goes to plan and that is also okay. To say that this class was chaotic would be an understatement. I experienced a few significant classroom management obstacles that in my mind impacted the quality of the lesson. Additionally, the activity I had planned did not work as intended. As students left the class, I felt defeated. This was by far the worst class of my practicum. Instead of focusing on the negatives of this lesson, I want to focus on what went well despite the negatives. This was no doubt a challenging lesson, but I was able to deal with all the challenges and still be outwardly calm and patient with students. The activities did not go exactly as planned, but the students were engaged and clearly learning English. We didn’t meet our objective for the lesson, which was to practice clarification. However, the students did gain experience in giving and following directions.

Nothing in this lesson went according to the plan and that is okay. For me being able to look past the negatives and see this lesson as a learning experience is a big step. I hope that in the future when I have a class that doesn’t go according to my plan that I can take a deep breath and use it as another learning experience.

The goal of the class today was to facilitate a student discussion with minimal teacher input and to introduce discussion roles. For our warm-up activity we played a video about basketball and had students answer discussion questions as a group. I thought that the warm-up went very well. The students seemed to enjoy the video and talked a lot during the discussion. Unfortunately, I do not think that our main activity went as well. For the main activity we assigned each student an interesting point in Canadian history and had them read a short paragraph about it individually and then summarize what they learnt to the class. We underestimated how long this would take and ran out of time and because of this not all students were able to summarize their learning. Additionally, I think that our discussion roles need some work. I don’t think that they all worked as well in the online classroom as they would have face-to-face.  I think that figuring out what works in the online classroom will take some trial and error. I am also beginning to wonder what it will be like to be teaching in a face-to-face classroom. The thought of stepping into a classroom with no practice or experience makes me a little nervous. I think in the future I will try to seek out volunteer opportunities in a face-to-face classroom, so that I can gain some experience.

I am having a hard time telling when students understand the material and the instructions and when they need more clarification. For me, I rely heavily on nonverbal communication in the classroom and not being able to see all their faces is a challenge. Next week I plan on utilizing the set status function in Big Blue Button to do quick surveys to check for understanding.

This week was my seventh hour of practicum teaching. It is hard to believe that I only have three hours left. Reflecting on my practicum so far, I think that my teaching skills have improved a lot. However, I recognize that I have a long way to go to become the teacher that I would like to be. In my next three teaching hours I would like to work on being more succinct when giving directions and providing more feedback. Additionally, when creating lessons, I would like to try to make the content more relatable and make sure that the activities I plan have a purpose. Writing objectives and purpose for each lesson has been something I have been struggling with, but this is something that is important. As a student, I often question if what we are doing in class is a valuable use of my time. Often, the answer is no. I believe that the answer is often no because I do not know what the purpose or objective of the lesson is. I do not want my students to feel as though class time is not valuable. Thus, I need to be proactive and create lessons with clear objectives.

This week I was working on being more succinct when giving directions and providing summaries. I discovered that it is hard to be succinct. I think that I need to spend more time before the lesson thinking about how I am going to explain activities. Specifically, I need to think about how I can explain activities with less words. I think that being succinct is something that will come with more practice. At the end of the main activity, I summarized the purpose of the activity and how each student performed.  This summary occurred naturally before ending the class.

Overall, this class went well. The students were engaged, all the students participated, and we completed the entire lesson plan on time. However, after the lesson finished, I felt overwhelmingly frustrated. I feel as though I am in a tug-a-war between creating a student-centered class and providing enough feedback and direction.  This tug-a-war is further exasperated by the online environment that I am currently teaching in. I find that I have difficulty providing correction and feedback in the online learning environment because I am limited in the methods, I can use to provide feedback. It seems that even a small correction completely disrupts any discussion that is occurring in the class. In short, when I succeed in creating a student-centered class I feel as though I do not provide adequate structure and correction and when I succeed in providing correction and structure it is too teacher focused. I am also struggling to create student centered lessons that are suitable for all the students in my mixed level class. Inherently, my lower level students need more structure than the upper level.

I recognize that the frustration I am feeling is part of the tension of being both a student and a teacher. I think on a grander scale I am trying to adapt to a teaching style I am not entirely comfortable with yet, especially in an online environment. Furthermore, I think I am having a hard time finding a balance between the conflicting expectations of the different stake holders. Moving forward I would like to find a way to have parts of my classes be more structured and others be more open and unstructured. I also would like to experiment with different teaching styles to see what I feel comfortable with and what works for my students.

Although, I am feeling frustrated this week I am seeing a lot of growth and improvement in my teaching and know that feeling uncomfortable is part of moving from being a student to a teacher.

The third hour of teaching brought new experiences and opportunities to learn. Our goal for this lesson was for it to be student centered our lesson plan reflected that. To make the lesson more student centered we gave each student a role and encouraged them to turn on their cameras. We also turned off our cameras for much of the lesson. I think that our lesson plan did encourage the students to talk more. However, the student-centered activities took more time than we anticipated. We only got through one of the three activities we had planned. I also found it very difficult to not chime in and encourage the students to talk more. This lesson could have been more successful if we defined the roles better. Next lesson we plan to explicitly explain each role and their purpose. I think that we are heading in the right direction in making our lesson plans more student focused. However, I think that we need to keep working on refining our lesson plans and timing.

This week I taught my first class. For the next ten weeks, I will be co-teaching an online mixed level reading lab. The students in this class come from various cultural backgrounds and have speaking abilities ranging from level one to level three. The focus of this week’s class was to get to know the students and access their speaking abilities.  I was pleasantly surprised by how excited the students were to meet us. Many of them expressed that they are combating loneliness and are struggling with the current reality of the pandemic. I hope that for the next ten weeks that this class can help alleviate some of the loneliness they are experiencing, in addition to improving their speaking abilities.

Overall, I thought that this class was a success. All the students participated in the activities and did so using English. At the beginning of the lesson I was quite nervous and upon reflection I realized that I was speaking too fast. As the lesson progressed, I became more comfortable and my speaking became slower. However, I think that even my slower pace was too fast for some of the students. Thus, over the next ten weeks I would like to work on my pace and tone of voice. I would also like to become more comfortable providing corrections. Providing correction wasn’t the goal of this lesson, but in the coming weeks this is something that I will need to do to help students progress.

On a personal note, after the lesson was done, I couldn’t stop smiling. I am excited to see myself grow and become a better teacher over the course of this practicum.  This experience reaffirmed that teaching is a career that I will be passionate about for the rest of my professional life.