Class #3
To teach paraphrasing sounded easy, but it was a lot harder than I thought. I think the way we started the lesson off by paraphrasing what the other person did on the weekend was a good idea, but we could have gone, father. Looking back, I think it would have worked better if we asked students what they did this weekend and paraphrased it instead. I think it could have made for a great opening and warm-up task. If I am teaching paraphrasing in the future, this is something that I want to play around with. In this lesson, I decided to play around with multiple choice a bit to try and get more participation. In the first class, there was a decent amount of students who attempted to answer, which was a good sign. Although I like the use of videos, I want to try and find some more entertaining ones if possible. When it came to the group work most of the groups worked well together. I do find it awkward going into breakout rooms, and I think that is just something I will get used to with time. The first class did well and seemed to understand the content. The last thing we did was ask for some feedback with some multiple-choice questions again. The majority answer was yes to every question, so I am glad they liked the use of polls, and hopefully, I will be able to play around with them again. They seemed to enjoy the group work as well, and I think that is because it is a stronger class, so everyone puts in the effort because they are a little bit more confident. As for the class practice, with this being a stronger class we were curious if they liked us working as a group to practice before they try it in smaller groups. The answer was yes again, so we will have to keep doing it, which is nice because the second class needs that practice. I liked asking for feedback from our classes, and I think it’s important to know what’s working and what is not. Especially for us in our practicum when we can practice the different tools and see which works best.
Class #4
As usual, the second class is always a little bit more challenging, but it is the challenges that will make us better teachers. This time my multiple choice question did not get as much participation as I would like, and we only had a few students participating. It often feels like no matter what we do with these students, most of them are just not wanting to participate, and it is a little frustrating. We had a few more difficulties with the group work in this class. I checked on two groups while Chloe checked on the other two groups. This time we tried having captains or leaders, so we took those our sponsor teacher thought to be the strongest and made them in charge of the group. Unfortunately, this tactic did not work as well as we were hoping and made it rather unfair for a few people. For a couple of the groups, it meant that one person was doing all the work. I went into the rooms multiple times asking that everyone participate and work together. To not just leave it to the one student, but all I got was silence from most of the others. This was extremely disheartening. Whether they didn’t listen to me because they didn’t think of me as their actual teacher, I don’t know. One of the students who was a leader was extremely frustrated. I wasn’t sure what to do in this situation, but I knew that I was going to make sure that it didn’t happen again. My goal is to create a strategy to ensure that. When it came to the feedback at the end of the lesson it was a little bit more mixed. More people didn’t like the group work for the reason given up above, I think. On a positive note, one of the students messaged me and said that she thought I was a really good teacher and liked how encouraging I was. That put a smile on my face and reminded me that not every day is going to be easy, but it’s all worth it to help people learn.
