After finishing the Teaching Practicum II course, I am very satisfied with all the new things I have learned, and with the results that, as a group, we were able to achieve. Now, I am finishing my fifth year at the university, I have successfully approved more than the 90% of my classes, including Teaching Practicum I, and II, and I can say that I feel very proud of that. I have also been able to get some experience in the teaching field, besides the two Teaching Practicum classes, I have also been able to get a job teaching English at E4CC, an academy that teaches English for the call center industry, and also at Universidad Don Bosco, teaching English to the employees of that institution.
The first weeks in this course represented a challenge for me. I felt really comfortable with the idea of teaching teenagers, however I realized we were going to be using a new framework called ECRIF. This resulted difficult for me, it used to take me a lot of time to plan a lesson, and I used to run out of ideas really quick. Nonetheless, after practicing several times, this became easier. Now, I can easily plan a lesson using ECRIF, and I feel that this framework helps me as a teacher to be more organized, and it also helps my students to achieve their goals since it is more flexible compared to other frameworks. I was really happy to see the great improvement some of my classmates had throughout this course. Deyanira for example, now she seems to be more comfortable in front of students, she is now very creative when it comes to activities, and she has learned to gain the control of the class. There are few areas of opportunity, however her improvement is evident. Another example would be Luis, who had a special challenge since his lessons where the longest, lasting 90 minutes each. Nonetheless, he was able to deal with that situation, he showed excellent time management and creativity to maintain students’ attention for such a long period of time. Besides that, he also seems to feel more comfortable while conducting a class.
Considering all the aspects I have mentioned in the previous paragraphs, and more, I confidently say that I have achieved the objective of this course. I am now able to plan a lesson using ECRIF in an efficient period of time, I can analyse and assess a lesson designed by someone else, I have plenty of ideas about activities that will help my students to acquire specific information, and I have experience on how to deal with teenagers in the classroom. The last thing I would like to say is that this course was really useful and satisfying, I am sure that all of my classmates would say the same. I am looking forward to complete my studies, and this put me a step closer to that. Thank you for reading.
