Reflection 9 – I feel like I am slowly moulting!

April 28, 2014

This second MT was quite interesting.  After I finished, I still felt the same as my first MT.  I felt that it went horribly wrong and that it did not go the way I wanted it to go.  My intention for this lesson was talk go through an article that they would eventually use for a debate.  For two of my reading classes, we’re trying to introduce debate into our reading program so it’s still a working idea.  I knew this MT was going to be challenging because I had to combine my original teaching style, with the assignment.  An article like this is supposed to be a little challenging to my students, but it’s a level that my students would be able to comprehend when planned more carefully. 

Before watching the video, I realized the first thing that I should have done was to have the students read aloud, not silent reading; rotating students after reading one sentence.  I never do silent reading, and I don’t know why I did that.  My front page was written for rotational read aloud, and I would fix their pronunciation, but my lesson plan had it differently.  I didn’t give the students enough time so they felt it was too hard.  I should have however, told them that they would pre-read this article several times before coming to class so they would’ve been familiar with it.  In any case, I feel reading it together aloud, would’ve helped them understand the story more. 

It was difficult teaching this class as if it was my real class and finding the motivation without a preview.  I was concentrating too much on the format of my lesson plan and the format of the Harmer format (p. 291).  Therefore there was no real interacting going on.  There was T-S interaction and T-S-S-T interaction, but but I felt I was just mostly telling them what to do like they were just following orders.  There was no real personalizing and interacting with the students.  I feel I could’ve created more motivation and interaction if I asked discussion or personalizing questions during the comprehension check phase, where we took up our answers to the sheet.  I had students ask each other what the answers to the next question were, but before I did that, we could’ve created a conversation about the questions.  Originally, I was saving the discussion question to the end.  Again, I was thinking too much on how to do the TD, TDBU, BU method. 

For the lead in, I tried to ask them if they can find the URL so they could be able to find it on the internet if they want.  However, after watching the video, I could have asked them if they use the internet, if they use it to do homework, and basically personalize with them a little more.  Even if it was a question or two. 

I asked the students what the subheadings were, but I could have asked them to quickly scan the article for a minute and then I could have asked them what the subheadings were by TSST interaction.  After, I could have asked them to tell their partners what they thought each subheading was going to be about.  This, I believe, would have been top-down.  After reading, I could have changed the questions, and one of them could have been how their answers changed.  When the students were discussing in their groups, I could have interacted with the students more instead of just walking around quietly. 

One thing I should have done was to write the answers to the questions beforehand.  I thought I would have been able to handle the answers fine, but I forgot on the spot. 

Compared to the first MT, I felt I was more relaxed, but I still had the jitters and I was able to concentrate on a little more, but my plan didn’t work out the way I planned.  I felt I had more communicative feedback than evaluative compared to before, I still feel that it was not enough feedback.  The students are at a point where they need to start thinking more about this topic and speak more in English.  I felt I was just trying to follow my plan too much. 

I feel I am improving but there is a conflict between my original style and what I am learning and it’s definitely a good conflict.  I am learning a lot by watching others too.  I am concentrating too much on the teaching formalities, rather than personalizing with the students.  However, I know that my classroom atmosphere is totally different.  The constant question I have is how I can successfully and efficiently teach a lesson.  I feel like this is just the beginning of my moulting stage!  I hope I change for the better!  

Reflection 8 – I guess hard work and patience does pay off...

April 22, 2014

Things don’t seem to slow down for me.  I accepted the fact that I would not have a life until this course finishes, but it still is a little overwhelming.  In any case, I will still try to do the best that I can! 

This week’s topic for my Tuesday’s speaking class was telling time.  As I said before, this class is the most challenging class for me so I need to do a lot of planning, but I’m learning more from this course on how to do it. 

Up until now, I concentrated a lot on content and how I was going to teach it in a way that the students would accept and enjoy.  I tried to mix in games as well, and then I put emphasis in the warm up/preview, and also tried to connect more with the students by making the teacher talk more dialogic.  So basically, I tried to incorporate a lot of what I learned in this course.  For this week, I wanted to study my discourse and tried to use more MIC techniques into my teaching, even if we were playing a game. 

My anticipated problems were: the students not being able to tell time, even in Korean; they would have difficulty understanding instructions, and if they were able to tell time, they would have difficulty telling it English.  My anticipated solution was to ask other students to help each other, and do more MIC techniques (repeat, gesture, visual, rephrase, preview).  For MIC techniques, I would try to correct them and have them repeat, or I could draw on the board more, and I could rephrase my questions differently.  Basically, I would try to consciously put more of my effort into MIC techniques. 

I started out with a basic greeting, where the students were now able to respond a little faster, and give different responses, followed by a short reason.  I was quite pleased because they didn’t answer like that a few weeks ago.  Then for the preview, I first asked them to tell me what the current time was in English, and then I put up a picture of a clock on the WB.  I taped the minute and hour hand and randomly asked students to tell me what the time is.  To help them, I wrote on the WB: ‘What time is it?’  and ‘It is…’.  The students understood what they were supposed to do and they followed the instructions quite well.  Throughout the entire lesson, they referred to the WB to answer their questions. They had difficulty telling the minutes, and then I realized later that they had difficulty counting higher numbers.  So I wrote down 15, 30, and 45, and o’clock to help them.  I got the students to ask the question to each other by asking: “(name), what time is it?”  Generally by this point, I didn’t expect the students to have much interest, and didn’t expect them to really respond.  But they answered and participated better than I thought.

The preview took longer than I had originally planned.  I then gave them a hand out.  It had pictures of clocks that had different times.  I went around and asked each student individually on what the time was.  I asked them: what time is it? and then they responded by saying ‘it is…’.  I tried to use gestures for them to look on the board and answer according to what was written.  They followed pretty quickly and answered quite well. 

Next, I skipped an activity that I planned due to time, and then played a game.  The other side of the handout had different times with a number beside it.  I put them into two teams and I would read out the time or the number, and the students would have to tell me what time or number it was.  It was challenging to some, but generally, it was a suitable for their level.  Again, they had difficulty reading the time and also listening and indicating what the time or number was.  So to help them, I tried to point to the numbers that were written on the board, or said the first letter of the word. 

I then played Time Bingo at the end.  I handed out a time bingo card, where they were to draw the hour hand and write the time for each square.  I would then read out a time and if they got 3 in a row, then they would call out BINGO.  Before I reward them the point, they would have to read the time back to me, which was a little challenging for them. 

The terminal objective for this lesson was for the students to successfully tell time.  The enabling objective was for them to read and answer the question (written on the board), read clocks and tell time, and enjoy and actively participate in the activities.  I felt that the objectives were met.  I felt that the students were getting more comfortable with me and the class style.  I made a conscious effort on warm up every class, with all my classes, and I felt that the students were getting more comfortable with this method.  I also made more of a conscious effort on the MIC techniques, but I hope I can improve on them.  I feel I am getting more comfortable with this class and they are getting more comfortable with me, but I know there is still more to go. 

I wanted to upload the full video of my lesson, but for some reason it stopped recording half way through.  I tried to give more wait-time to the students and I felt it was suitable for the students.  I was shocked when I said “has test” so many times.  I said to help them understand better, but I realize now that talking like that isn’t really necessary.  And I didn’t realize that I said that so many times.  Overall, I liked the way how things were done in this class and it was good to see the students getting more comfortable with each other and with me.  

Reflection 7 – T’was [a little] blind, but now I see [a little more]…

April 10, 2014

My first speaking class of the week was on Tuesday.  After horrible planning last week, I spent some time thinking of how to teach this week’s lesson.  This week’s lesson was on sports and the students would learn how to ask “do you play…”, “do you…”, and “do you do…” questions, depending on the sport, and they would learn to respond by saying “yes, I do” or “no, I don’t”.  I’m still trying to find a good method or curriculum for teaching this class, so I changed the format of the lesson plan again. 

My task was to go over warm-up, then a preview to activate schema, followed by the lesson and some games in between.  I have not done warm-ups with this class, so I was interested to see their reactions.  I taught my Friday’s class “how are you doing” but I didn’t teach them how they can respond, so they were a little confused.  So this time I decided to write some of the responses (also remembered some of the other MT ideas).  I wanted to record the whole class, but I realized afterwards that I didn’t have enough space.  But oddly enough, it recorded all of my warm-up, and stopped right when I was going to start my preview.  My warm-up is around 4 minutes and 37 seconds.

I knew they were going to have difficulty understanding and following instructions, but I felt it was harder today because they were in a bad mood from the previous class.  But I tried to boost the atmosphere.  I tried to ask “Did you have fun from your previous class?” but they didn’t seem to understand.  I was expecting them to scream out yes or no, or just basically say anything, but they were really quiet.  I felt this was a way to personalize with them.  I wanted to ask them more, based on what they said. 

Afterwards, I had the class read together what was on the board: “how are you doing.”   If I felt they were not paying attention or they were too quiet or they had difficulty pronouncing it, I repeated it again until they were all speaking loudly.  Afterwards, I tried to get students to ask each other.  Because they were not used to it, and after rushing my MT on Saturday, I decided to give them some wait-time, but at the same time be cautious so that they don’t feel they are on the spot.  I felt they were a little shy and confused at first, but they seemed to get used to it and the speed improved. 

They know from previous classes what side Team A is and what side Team B is.  So I told them they had to ask the student on the other side but the surprising thing was that some of the female students didn’t want to ask the male students.  The male students didn’t mind.  But I didn’t realize how young they were until today.  They were trying to choose who to ask so I tried to be understanding and be patient with them. 

After watching the video, I saw my habit of saying too many ‘ok’s’, and too much evaluative teacher talk (ok, yes, very good), instead of communicative t-talk.  But I’m not sure how I could do communicative t-talk with this class.  Or should I be more evaluative, such as being more enthusiastic?  Or would it be much different if I just significantly reduced saying the word: ok?   I wanted to personalize with them more like I do with the other class, but I’m not sure what it is about this class.  This class, however, is new and they are still getting to know each other, it still is an interesting experience.   

For my preview, I asked them what sports they liked.  At first, they didn’t seem to understand or maybe they were too shy, so I had to say some sports.  After asking the students individually, I told them we were going to play a memory game for points.  I would ask one member of a team and ask them what sport one member from the other team liked.  I rotated teams and made sure each player answered once.  Generally, they seemed slightly interested, some remembered what the others said, and some didn’t remember.  I awarded them points but they still didn't seem too energetic.  At least it wasn’t the reaction I was expecting. 

 

Next, I gave them a handout.  We read some words and repeated them several times.  There were different sports that were organized by ball sports, individual sports, and Asian sports.  After repeating them and asking if they liked those sports, which they responded quite well (closed questions), I wrote on the board of how they would ask the question of if they did that sport. 

For example, ball sports, I told them you would say: Do you play ___________?  For individual sports: Do you ____________?  For Asian sports: Do you do ___________?  I asked the students individually (referential question), while pointing to the sentence on the board.  Then the students would respond by saying: yes, I do or no, I don’t, which they have at the top of the page.  Then I had students ask each other.  They would use the board for assistance, they would take time, but generally, I felt they were slowly learning, or at least learning the pattern of how to ask and respond. 

Afterwards, I had them play a speed game.  I decided that the individuals would get the point.  The point of the game was to see if they can ask six questions in one minute, one after another, that was not intended to anyone.  They were a little confused at first, but after repeating the instructions several times, they understood and they were all given a chance.  They referred to the board to answer; some students were faster than others, and although they asked the questions in incorrect form (ex. Do you play taekwondo?), I just let it slide, because I felt it was important they practice their speaking, and improve their confidence doing it. 

Overall, I felt the energy and mood would improve as the class progressed, but I feel it didn’t really improve.  I don’t know if they were bored, but they all put in effort in doing the task that they were supposed to do.  For feedback, there was a lot evaluative feedback, and there was a lot of repetition (and reading), but I feel that this may be the first step in teaching the students, because they are not at the level to answer for themselves.  I have to continually think of ways to get this energy level way up there so they have fun learning.

This class is one of the most difficult classes I have, but it’s also one of the most exciting and challenging classes I have.  I feel this challenge is helping my eyes open even wider as a teacher.  

Reflection #6 – My First MT Experience…

April 9, 2014

My first micro-teaching experience was very interesting.  I changed my whole lesson plan for one of my classes, and I put in warm-ups for the first time.  So after I taught it (unsuccessfully), I thought I would be fine when I did the MT in front of the class.  I was fine all the way until I was up.  As soon as I was called, all the emotions suddenly hit me and I felt so nervous.  I was way more nervous in front of this class than any of my classes that I teach. 

Anyways, my first thoughts after I finished was how nervous I was in class and because I was so nervous, I rushed a lot, not being able to communicate with the students.  My intention was to get students to talk but I talked most of the time.  The students didn’t really seem too interested but I felt that they understood what I wanted them to do.

After looking at the video, I realized how bad I actually was.  Because I was so nervous, I tried to talk more and get things moving more quickly.  But it was so quick that I wasn’t personalizing at all with the students, when there were so many opportunities to.  I was very conscious of time but not on the students.  I realized that the students could have easily thought that I ignored them.  This was the most surprising part of my MT.  Some of the reasons I try to get my students to do repetitions of target vocabulary is so that they can get used to it more and I can hear their pronunciations.  So I did do it in this MT, but because I wasn’t personalizing, I felt it may not have been as efficient as I thought.  I know it would have been different with my normal classes, and I would have personalized more, waited for them to answer, and basically, would have taken more time.

One of the things I knew I was saying a lot was “ok.”  It could be heard as a sign of acceptance but I realized it could be heard as a sign of my uncertainty, nervousness, or even ignoring students and trying to move onto something else quickly.  I did however try using the WB as planned, tried moving around the class, and tried asking different students, but I was asking a lot of closed questions, when I could have asked more referential questions and got more student-student interactions.  For feedback, I realized the majority of it was evaluative t-talk (ok, very good, yes).  More communicative t-talk could have also generated more discussion. 

My intent on activating schema was through vocabulary.  My plan was to show them the words, have them repeat it, ask them if they know it, then show the pictures afterwards.  If they didn’t know the picture, I would help them by asking them to look at the words.  Then, I would play a word-picture matching game.  I realized that I wasn’t really activating schema, but I was teaching vocabulary.  My actual warm-up was only 1 minute and 33 seconds.  For the warm up, I could have slowed down, wrote the responses for “how are you doing” on the WB, then ask them to repeat it and get students to ask each other.  

To activate schema, I thought of it incorrectly.  I could have shown a single picture of a dirty house.  I could have asked them to brainstorm ideas on what needs to be done to clean the house.  Possibly show them a before picture (dirty) and then an after picture (clean), and then ask them what needs to be done in order to be clean.  I could have asked them both open and referential questions, and this could have generated more discussion.  If they cannot answer properly, I can then move onto the vocabulary section. 

For the vocabulary part, after asking them to read and repeat each word, I could have asked more referential questions, asked as a class and individually, and expand more on their responses.  The words were also extremely small.  I was asking them what the words and pictures were, the students were then responding, but I wasn’t using their answers to expand on them.  Instead of saying “what is this?” I could have transitioned the next item by saying something like “now this next one is something that is very loud” (referring to the vacuum). 

To save time, after asking the students of the words and pictures, I could have asked them to put them on the board.  I could ask individual students of each item, award them points, and they would put them on the board.  After they put it on, I could then quickly move onto the next item, and hopefully they would find this fun by earning points and moving around the room. 

Generally, if I wasn’t so nervous and didn’t rush everything, I felt I could have personalized more with the students.  I realized how bad I was after reviewing the video several times, but not only was I able to learn from it, I was also able to generate more ideas.  I know I would have acted differently in my normal class.  I generally make a big effort in asking all the students and have every student understand, even if there is a lot of wait-time, but in this MT, I think my wait-time was not there at all. 

I learned so much from this experience and got so many ideas.  I didn’t think I would have gained this much.  I’m interested to see what lies ahead.

Reflection #5 – What a week…

April 4, 2014

I feel like I have been staring at this blank document forever.  Not because I’m trying to think about what to write…but because there’s so much to write about…

First off, this week has been very hectic.  Last weekend, we had a teachers meeting and we were supposed to talk about some ongoing issues, and basically start fresh with a new canvas.  It’s the beginning of the school year, and this is the time where a lot of parents are looking into new hakwons – a lot of students dropping and joining.  Our hakwon keeps growing so we’re supposed to start new classes this week.  We did, however, we had one teacher quit this week.  There was so much drama between the teachers but we we’re all trying to keep it behind closed doors.  I don’t want to go into details, but it was extremely difficult this week.  On top of all this, my mind has been all over the place.  Some of my classes are relatively new, but I keep getting more classes, and as my knowledge as a teacher continues to grow, it was getting pretty overwhelming and stressful. 

Despite everything that’s been going on, one of the things that have been on the top of my head was warm-up and greeting.  It wasn’t something I have really thought of.  We run a pretty busy schedule from the afternoon to the evening, with a maximum class size of 8.  We see all the students in the halls before our class starts and talk to them even before they start class with a different teacher.  So I was trying to figure out how I could incorporate it into my lesson plan.  Although I made a conscience effort to try greeting the students more and trying to make them relax, I wanted to really focus on two of my classes – one on Tuesday and one on Friday. 

For Tuesday’s class, there was so much drama boiling at that point, at the same time when we were starting our first classes on that day, I couldn’t really prepare for it.  For my Friday’s class, I usually went by a book and went by the previous teachers ideas and lesson plans.  But this week, I decided to try something totally new.  It was a speaking class for four 9-10 year old boys.  Up until now, they would do some reading, there would be specific questions that they would ask each other, and I would give them points accordingly.  However, they had difficulty reading, they were young so they had a hard time concentrating, and basically, I felt I wasn’t teaching efficiently. 

So this week, I planned my lesson by starting my greeting by asking them, “How are you doing?”  I don’t usually write things on the WB before hand, but I tried to use it as much as I could before the start of my class.  So I decided to write their names on the side (so I keep an ongoing record of their points); today’s topic; and the question on the board, thinking that the students would know what to expect.  I would first start off by asking individually how they were doing, and then I would get them to ask each other.  Then I would ask them questions on what they brought into class, because they would always have snacks or something new from the previous class. 

However, it didn’t go as planned.  First, the previous class ended really late so I started late.  This is a problem because I have other classes that start right after one finishes.  So I had reduced time and there was a lot of “activity” going on because of the start of new classes.  Also, I expected them to ask me if they could speak Korean because they wouldn’t know how to say a lot of things, but when I asked them how they were doing, they either said, “I don’t know” or kept doing other things (ex. eating food, joking around).  I tried asking them individually, but I was getting the same response. 

Because I was pressed for time, I decided to just move on.  I knew that if I had tried asking that question in different ways, the students would have gotten really bored.  Then, I kept thinking if I had to do a warm-up or preview that made the students interact with each other, even though it had nothing to do with the topic.  But I didn’t think it would have been good for my class – time being one reason.  Today’s topic was thinking about what we can do for our parents on special days such as Mother’s Day.  My plan for the enabling objectives was for the students to learn words that relate to house chores that they would do at home.  To activate schema, I’m not sure if I thought of it correctly, but I thought of doing it bottom-up.  I wanted to review some vocabulary first, so when they listened to the CD of the main passage, they would have a better understanding of what it was talking about, and then they could use those words throughout the lesson. 

I printed and cut out the vocabulary words so that I can show them and have them repeat together.  I asked them what they were and they answered back using their L1.  I was quite surprised because they understood most of the words quite well.  After I showed each word, I taped them to the board.  After, I showed them pictures of the word.  I asked them again what they were and they answered quite well again.  Then I taped those onto the board as well.  I then made two teams of two, and had them match the words with the pictures.  By doing this game, I thought it would be a fun way to activate schema, help them understand the vocabulary for the lesson, at the same time recycle TLC. 

For the rest of the lesson, I felt it went well.  I had planned to ask them questions about mother’s day and what they do to help out, but they tried using the words that were on the board and I felt they did a great job.  They are young and at times, it’s hard to get four energetic boys to pay attention, but they were able to find the words they were looking for to answer my questions and fill out their worksheet.  In previous classes, they didn’t have too much fun reading and writing, so I tried to reduce that a lot by playing a game.  Rather than having them speak sentences, which I have been doing in the past, I tried to get them to practice on their vocabulary by playing BINGO.  I was worried that they wouldn’t have found it fun, but to my surprise, they had fun, and I realized it was helping them with their reading.  They couldn’t read and catch the words quite quickly.    

When I first started class, I was worried because my class time was reduced by 10-15 minutes.  But my next class came late, so what I thought of cancelling from my lesson, I just went with the flow.  If the class came, then I would just stop, but I was able to cover most of my lesson and they seemed to have fun with our new class style.  I really wanted to record this class, and I was already, but there were so many interruptions and disturbances that prevented me.  It took me several hours to prep for this 40 minute class, but I feel like I learned so much.  I tried to see if I could go more dialogic, but as soon as I tried, I realized there was that moment of silence and confusion, so I just made it more monologic. 

Everything was so hectic and I was so worried about this lesson, wondering if I was going to miss anything, not do anything, etc.  I had to manage my time really well, but once I started the BINGO game, I was just starting to feel at ease, and feel more comfortable.  Next time, I’m going to have to record, think of a better way to do the warm-up, and have them practice speaking more sentences, where they can also practice saying to each other (dialogic interaction).  Next time, instead of talking so much about what I did, I realize I have to record more of myself so I can see where things went wrong, and think about how to fix them.  More planning, but more reflection and corrective action!