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.