Reflection 4 - A Sudden Epiphany

March 28, 2014

For this week’s blog, I wanted to talk about planning.  Last week, we read chapter 21 from Harmer’s reading homework.  As I was reading it, it all seemed pretty straight forward and to a certain degree, seemed like it was common knowledge.  However, last week, I was going to use the computer at the hakwon to do some work and the first thing I saw was my co-workers lesson plan.  She is relatively new but she has a lot of teaching experience.  Because we don’t teach the same students, I never really talked to her about teaching.  She started teaching students younger than mine, and I was surprised to see her lesson plan.  It was nothing complex or extraordinary, but it was well planned, and as soon as I saw it, it quickly reminded me of chapter 21. 

I then went home and quickly skimmed the chapter again.  It felt like I just had an epiphany.  It was a weird feeling.  Planning should be common sense for teachers.  I thought I was doing it.  But it got me thinking about my two speaking classes.  I never felt comfortable with those classes and felt they were a challenge for me.  But I realized right then, that what I had to do was more pre-planning and planning. 

I thought about my speaking classes and thought what my goals were for those classes.    The chapter talks about aims, long term goals, and short term goals, so that made me think about what my goals were for these classes.  They are young and they don’t have strong skills, so I don’t expect them to speak well after several months.  But I wanted them to have fun with English and practice speaking it.  I wanted them to build their confidence and have fun while doing it.  My goals were always the same.  However, what I thought of planning, was different. 

Up until now, I was pretty much going off of what the previous teacher taught and I was going by her lesson plans.  But they were very brief.  I had used those brief plans and just basically, went with the flow.  I would have some plans but they were all in my head and they were planned at the last minute.  However, after seeing my co-workers plan, and seeing the example on page 374-375, I re-organized my plan accordingly. 

For my Tuesday’s class, the main topic was sea animals, and the questions that the students had to learn were: ‘what’s that?’, ‘what do you think about it?’, ‘what are those’, and ‘what do you think about them?’.  This time, I did some more planning – thinking about more specific vocabulary (thinking what animals they would think of), how I could teach them, how I can teach those sentences in a more active way, think of a different fun, educational activity, and also think about the interaction between teacher and class.  I never thought about this aspect, but I realized that I had to speak less, and think of ways to get the class to speak more.  Either through repetition or through student-student interactions. 

Thinking more about the interactions for these two classes made me think more about my plan, and made me adjust my plans accordingly.   Because they are lower level, they would take more time reading.  So I decided to do less reading, and organize it so that they could speak to each other more, such as through more or longer activities.  I needed to do more planning, instead of only following textbooks, or old lesson plans.

Unfortunately, I did not record this week.  However, I felt after more planning, the students were able to have a little more fun and I was able to expect that before hand.