New year, new semester, new experiences. I just started my Teaching Practicum II course, in which I will have the opportunity to work with teenagers. There were many ideas about what to expect from this class before it actually started. I felt excited, personally I feel more comfortable working with adolescents, although I know that it is one of the biggest challenges that teachers all around the world face. Teenagers are well know for their miss behaviour towards parents and teachers, that is why I have been looking forward to take a course in which I learn how to deal with this situation.
As part of our first assignment in this course, we conducted an investigation about the development of brain during adolescence. While doing my research in the National Institute of Mental Health (www.nimh.nih.gov) and Brain Connection (www.brainconnection.brainhq.com) websites, I learned something I did not know before, that the human brain is still under construction during adolescence. In fact, the brain doesn’t look like that of an adult until the early 20s. The main difference between a teenage brain and a fully mature brain lies in the frontal lobe, which is still under development during adolescence. The frontal lobe is the part of the brain that we use to make rational decisions. Thus, adolescents behave more emotional and impulsive than adults because they are not making decisions with their frontal lobe, but with their amygdalas. Once adulthood is reached, the overall focus of brain activity seems to shift from the amygdala to the frontal lobes. This fact influences many aspects of the lives of teenagers, who might go through difficult times while facing adolescence.
Considering all of the information stated above, I believe that working with teenagers might represent a challenge. Nonetheless, it is a challenge that I am looking forward to face. I have had few experience teaching teenagers before, and I have had both good and not so good experiences. Therefore, my expectations for this course are to learn a lot about adolescents, their behaviors, and how to deal with them. I must admit that I feel excited about this, and I feel committed to learn as much as possible. I also believe that this course will help me a lot to empathize with teenagers, because they are not just rebel monsters as many people think, they are going trough a stage in life in which not only their bodies, but also their brains, emotions, and feelings are changing, and most of the time they are not aware of this. That is why, guidance is important for them, and I expect to learn how to be a good mentor for my future teenage students.
This time I would like to write about the last lesson imparted by group number 2, conformed by Nancy, Jacky, Gloria, Brenda, and Janeth. This lesson was developed on October 11th, 2015 and I personally believe, they had an outstanding performance.
I would like to star by saying that I loved the material they used for this lesson, it was really colorful and it was definitely appealing to students' eyes. They managed to make a very created variation of both the Welcome and Good bye song, they provided students with material somehow related to the lyrics of the songs, and students evidently enjoyed that.
Their topic was an extension of the topic we had presented in the previous class, "My Dream Job", this time the customs were given to students who represented a profession during the whole lesson. They had prepared a wide variety of activities to practice the content being studied, and their goal was to prepare students to be able to write sentences stating what they wanted to be. Something I really liked is that they took advantage of the fact that the classroom we were using is really big, and they created activities in which students could move around the classroom and have some fun. That is something I would love to do, however it is important to know that not always will we have the chance to have a room as big as the one we were using during our Teaching Practicum. Nonetheless, the idea was lovely, and it would be a matter of adapting those activities to the classroom that we have available.
Of course, there were minimal details that could be improved, one of them was the pronunciation, in my opinion, we need to be really careful when introducing vocabulary, and we need to emphasized in the pronunciation of words that are unknown for our students. Also, I noticed that some of the group members were not matching the level of energy of their partners, and it is important for us to maintain a good energy, and a positive attitude during the whole lesson.
At the end of the class, students seemed really satisfied with the lesson, and during the production staged, it was clear that they had reached their objective. Overall, it was a great experience to see this grouop present their lesson.
It was our turn to teach again on November 9th, 2015. This time our topic was "My Dream Job", and we had to prepare a Listening class in which students were expected to identify professions and say what they want to be when they grow up.
This time we needed to be really prepared, since this was our last lesson and we could not afford to commit the same mistakes we had committed in previous lesson. Because of this, we took more time to prepare ourselves, we had more meetings and we took the time to get material as a team. The first thing we decided was to take advantage of the topic of the lesson, and we decided we were going to wear customs of professions, and we were going to prepare some for our students as well. It was really funny to pick our customs and to wear them. However, we needed to be careful not to distract our students from our lesson.
Once we had our lesson plan, and materials prepared, it was time to teach. It was so gratifying to see how much kids were enjoying our lesson, they were clearly excited about the customs we had prepared for them and for ourselves. They showed an amazing willingness to participate in all the activities, starting from the welcome song. This positive attitude lead to positive results, since they easily acquired the vocabulary and the structures being presented to them. This was evident during our Post Listening, and our Wrap Up stages, in which they easily performed as requested. At some point, however, we needed to be careful since their excitement could cause them to distract and lose their focus from the actual lesson. However, this did not happen and I, personally, felt satisfied with the results at the end of the class.
Feedback session this week was conducted differently, we received direct feedback from the teachers observing us, and we were expected to have worked on everything we needed to improve from lesson one. Among the things mentioned during feedback, we were told not to be afraid to use our body language and to model instructions whenever needed, we were told to be careful with the level of excitement of our students, and to use activities to help them calm down if the it is required. Our material was better this time, flashcards were big enough for students to see them, and they were bright and colorful.
It was our last opportunity to teach a class to that small group of kids, and I can say that I really enjoyed the time we spent together. And I appreciate all the feedback I received, This was a very satisfactory experience.
Worksheet prepared by the group for our last lesson
On October 26th, 2015 group number three, conformed by Vanessa, Wanda, Yennifer, Deyanira and Luis, had their second opportunity to direct a class for our students. It was evident they had taken into consideration the feedback they received on their first lesson, and the result was a very good class.
Their topic was "My Town", in which students were expected to be able to talk about places in their community. Overall, the members of the group seemed very confident and comfortable performing in front of the students, and that always results in a positive attitude from students as well. This was not the exception as students were really engaged in all the activities the group had prepared for them, and were willing to participate.
I liked the material the group had prepared, it was very colorful and bright, catching students' attention, I also liked the activities they did since they were not common and students seemed to enjoy them a lot. For example, they introduced the new vocabulary with a game that simulated a city, and students had to decide what to place to visit. It was a very creative way to introduce the vocabulary and to warm up the class. Peronally, I was surprised about how fast students were able to master the structure that was being presented by Luis, and then they were able to practice it using a spinning wheel, which was a very creative resource used by the group. At the end of the class, students were excited to practice what they had learned, and it was clear that the goal had been reached succesfully.
There are still details that could be improved by the members of this group, like classroom management, and voice projection, but at this point, we are all still learning, and in my personal opinion, they did a great job last class.
It was October 19th, 2015 and it was our turn to teach our second lesson. This was a particularly hard week, however, we got to learn how to deal with unexpected situations. Due to climate conditions in our country, the Ministry of Education decided to suspend classes in all public and private institutions, and this impacted our Teaching Practicum course too.
First of all, things got complicated when we lost most of our material due to the rain. We had to prepare new material minutes before the class, and because of this, we started our lesson a couple of minutes late. Besides this, we were really shocked when we saw that only two students had presented that day. However, we had to value the effort this two kids made to get to class that day, and we had to teach our lesson to them.
Our topic was "My House", we prepared a lesson in which students were going to learn vocabulary about household objects, and also the Possessive Adjectives, and the Demonstrative Pronouns. It was hard to adjust the activities we had prepared to only two students. Specially, since they were one girl and one boy, and the boy was clearly shy to work along with her. Nonetheless, we found the way to adapt or even improvise during our lesson, and in our Production stage, we noticed we were able to achieve our goal.
After the class was over, we had our usual feedback session, in it we were told to be more prepared for unexpected situations like all the ones we experienced that day. We were advised to have a back up plan, and to always maintain a positive attitude no matter what. We took care of the things we were told to improve the previous week, we created bigger flashcards and we gave students enough time to see them during the lesson.
After all, I am glad we had the opportunity to go through this situation, since this is something that every teacher will face sooner or later, and now I know how to deal with it when it happens to me again.
October 5th, 2015. It was the first time our group had to direct a real class in front of our young students. Our topic was "In My Classroom".
First of all, we had to pick a welcome and a good bye song, these two songs were going to be sung by our students throughout the whole course. We decided to use the "Hello - Hello", and the "After a While, Crocodile" song, both of them were taken from the YouTube channel Super Simple Songs. It was amazing to see how much children enjoyed these two songs, it was clear that the songs had caused an impact in them, since they helped them feel more comfortable, and at the
end, they left the classroom with a positive attitude.
During our lesson, students showed a very nice attitude, some of them were being shy at the beginning, but they ended up participating and showing a clear engagement in our lesson. As a group, we prepared our lesson plan and our materials, as well as a warm up, and wrap up activities. Children paid attention during the whole class, and they had a very good behavior. Similarly to the previous week, when my time to participate had come, I felt nervous, but being in front of the classroom and seeing the positive attitude that my students had, helped me to feel more relaxed, and I really enjoyed what I was doing.
60 minutes later, it was time for students to go home, not before singing the second song we had prepared for them, and picking up a snack we gave them. Once they were gone, it was feedback time.
During feedback we received several observations that will be more than useful, not only during the rest of this Teaching Practicum, but during the rest of our career as English teachers. I found out that my classmates and teacher had noticed I was feeling nervous at the beginning, they said it was reflecting in my body language, and I needed to relax so that students can feel relaxed as well. We were also advised to improve our material, since our flashcards were not big enough for students to see from their spots. Furthermore, we were told it would be more convenient to post our material in the wall, instead of just holding it in our hands. By doing this, students will be able to take a look at the material at any time they need it, helping them remember the content studied.
I received all the feedback with a positive attitude, since I know we are still learning, and we need to know what thing we can improve to be better teachers.
On September 30th, 2015 we had the first experience leading a class in the Teaching Practicum I course, it was the Diagnostic Class.
This was not a regular lesson, in that day we had the chance to get to know the kids who would be visiting us for the rest of the course, and who would become our students. As in every other course, we had to diagnose our students to know what they already knew and the things they needed to learn. In order to achieve this, each group created a series of activities aimed to find out how well students mastered a specific topic.
I have to admit that I was feeling nervous, not only because it was the first time we were going to direct a class in front of our students, but also because we were being observed by our classmates and teacher. However, when the time to start the class began, there was no more room for nervousness. As group number one we were the first ones to develop our activities, and after all, I felt very comfortable performing in front of the students. As the evening went by, all of the groups developed their activities. Then, at 4:30 pm, when kids were gone, it was time to conclude what we had observed during our Diagnostic Class.
Together, we conclude that our students were not true beginners, most of them had a basic knowledge about the topics we presented, such as animals, colors, classroom objects, etc. Because of this, we decided that we were going to use a syllabus that would result challenging but fair for them. After taking this decision, we were given the dates in which we were required to teach, and the topics to develop. Once the Diagnostic Class was over, it was time to start preparing for the real experience. An experience I will share with you in the following entries of this blog.
As part of our first assignment in this course, we conducted an investigation about the development of brain during adolescence. While doing my research in the National Institute of Mental Health (www.nimh.nih.gov) and Brain Connection (www.brainconnection.brainhq.com) websites, I learned something I did not know before, that the human brain is still under construction during adolescence. In fact, the brain doesn’t look like that of an adult until the early 20s. The main difference between a teenage brain and a fully mature brain lies in the frontal lobe, which is still under development during adolescence. The frontal lobe is the part of the brain that we use to make rational decisions. Thus, adolescents behave more emotional and impulsive than adults because they are not making decisions with their frontal lobe, but with their amygdalas. Once adulthood is reached, the overall focus of brain activity seems to shift from the amygdala to the frontal lobes. This fact influences many aspects of the lives of teenagers, who might go through difficult times while facing adolescence.
Considering all of the information stated above, I believe that working with teenagers might represent a challenge. Nonetheless, it is a challenge that I am looking forward to face. I have had few experience teaching teenagers before, and I have had both good and not so good experiences. Therefore, my expectations for this course are to learn a lot about adolescents, their behaviors, and how to deal with them. I must admit that I feel excited about this, and I feel committed to learn as much as possible. I also believe that this course will help me a lot to empathize with teenagers, because they are not just rebel monsters as many people think, they are going trough a stage in life in which not only their bodies, but also their brains, emotions, and feelings are changing, and most of the time they are not aware of this. That is why, guidance is important for them, and I expect to learn how to be a good mentor for my future teenage students.
