We've now had the opportunity to observe other students in the class teaching two times. Think about the teaching demos you have seen. Did you learn something new, like a new technique or a new activity? Did you learn something not to do, like a behavior or a task? Did you learn anything about yourself as a teacher, about teaching in general, or about what makes a good teacher?
Your blog assignment this time is to reflect upon what you learned from the teaching demos. This should be a personal reflection, and it is not your chance to criticize the teaching demos of your classmates, so please keep your comments polite and respectful and focused on your own personal lessons.
Not that this blog assignment should appear as a comment to this post, be a minimum of 1 paragraph in length, and should be completed by classtime on Monday, 4/25.
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Teaching demos are fun and helpful, even for more experienced teachers, as there is always lots of room to improve. It also helps when you get a feedback on your lesson. I have learned some very creative approaches to teaching with the communicative purpose. I also liked a lot the lessons that were relevant to the targeted student population or were based on current events. I will definitely do that in my classroom when I teach. I like the idea that we as teachers can borrow techniques from each other. I really liked the discussions of each demo as a class in a non-threatening way with offering suggestions to each other.
ReplyDeleteUsually during demos you self-analyze your own lesson more than during a regular lesson when no other teachers are watching. What I learn every time when I do teaching demos or watch others do them is that there are so many details that need to be planned ahead in order to have a lesson go smoothly, especially with the time constraints. Such details are how to split the class into small groups or pairs, how to pick ‘volunteers’ for the assignment, how to think things through so everyone participates and stays on task, how to divide the class space for different activities when students need to get out of their desks. All these things need to be strategically planned, as otherwise it can end up being full of dead time or chaos.
I learned a lot while both doing and watching the demos. I think what I learned the most was how to take a lesson and modify it to meet the needs of an ESL audience. This can be really helpful since ESL students are now being mainstreamed into regular classrooms and are marked as "sheltered" but getting the same instruction as the rest of the class. I didn't realize how much difference could be made through the use of pictures and directions that included an example each time until I was a "student" and felt lost on some of the lessons, and I'm a native speaker. So if I were an ESL student I probably wouldn't ask for help. This made me re-think the way I give my own directions and especially how I pace myself. This aspect of the demos, getting the perspective of a student, was very enlightening in a lot of ways and made it very easy for me to pick out which strategies I wanted to borrow from classmates and which ones probably wouldn't work for me.
ReplyDeleteI also really liked that some feedback was given by the class after each lesson. For instance in my last lesson Iya made a comment about being prepared to guide the students in the right direction if nobody sees a pattern in the rules, and I thought, o my gosh yea what if that happens in a real setting. I really enjoyed the fact that I even had a chance to try out an inductive approach to learning before getting into a real classroom because I now feel much more confident about using it and I know what kinds of things need to modified within my own plan when creating such a lesson.
I enjoyed the teaching demos a lot, and it’s great to see everyone’s creativity in action. In general, I come away thinking that I have a lot to learn, but I also am beginning to feel that the formal component of planning a lesson on paper and thinking it through is becoming easier than it seemed even at the beginning of this course(and I’d already taken 5302).In general, what I guess I’d call “classroom management” takes plenty of effort and thinking quickly on your feet. And I keep returning to the fact that teaching another language is very different from what it was when I took language classes (some decades ago!).
ReplyDelete“Know your students” strikes me as a very good principle to follow, and it’s something to think about when we are tasked with planning a semester of classes beforehand, yet we meet the students only on the first day of class. I guess that’s why I’ve always heard that teaching a course for the second time is when a teacher really begins to feel comfortable with the course: you know then, or have some experience, as to what works and what does not.
Last, the various lessons and the various student populations that my classmates targeted make me look forward to encountering different student populations in the future. I am going to try to volunteer-teach at a different facility next year so that I can start to encounter other settings, students, and approaches.
Doing teaching demo was nervous yet fun, and watching other’s teaching was also very interesting and helpful! Each person’s lesson differed from one another, so I could see a wide spectrum of teaching style in terms of the degree of formality, teacher’s authority, and so on. After several demos, I realized that there is no single answer to the teaching style, because I could enjoy most of them as long as the teacher is putting much effort. Thus, I learned that to be a good teacher, I should know myself well and develop the teaching style that fits my characteristic, rather than just try to imitate an “ideal teaching style.”
ReplyDeleteI also realized the importance of clear instructions not to confuse students. As teachers, we try to design a class as thoroughly as possible. We picture the flow of the class, imagine students’ reactions, and predict questions that students might ask. This enables us to deal with various situations in class flexibly. However, I think sometimes it makes us so familiar with the activities that we regard students will understand the instructions without any problem, which is not always the case. Modeling of the activity with enough explanation helped me to understand what I was supposed to do. I would do the same when I teach next time, and make sure that everybody has understood before I start the activity.
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ReplyDeleteWatching my classmates give their demo-lessons was a very useful opportunity for me to learn about things that might or might not work for my students. I was particularly impressed with a lot of activities that were presented in these demo lessons. For example, the travel activity that Iya presented and the writing complaints activity, which I thought was very organized and well planned, and many other activities that I believe organized and well executed. I particularly learned the importance of effective planning in order to eliminate down time in class. I believe that every minute can be used efficiently to provide students with further practice of the targeted structure or language bit and to get students engaged and interested in the lesson. I have learned that ESL classes need to be more student centered and therefore, I am working on incorporating activities that allows students to have control and to have their needs be the steering wheel throughout my lessons.
ReplyDeleteI learned so many things from the demo lessons. First, I developed extra appreciation for my class mates. Quite a talented group! Many different teaching styles are represented in this group, so of course I re-learned that there is no one right style – only the best one for the individual and his/her students. As for myself, I’m learning that what I consider to be very clear instructions aren’t necessarily so. And, if my fellow students in LING 5301 don’t always understand them, pity my poor community center students! This is an area I will continue to work on. Fortunately for me, my students will be there to guide me.
ReplyDeleteWhat I learned from teaching demos is preparation. I could see that all of my classmates thought about the topic for a long time. Their teaching materials are based on quite amounts of research based on methodologies from various theories. The same topic can be approached differently according to the level of students’ proficiency and ages. All of the teaching demos modified the teaching materials to their target students’ level. In order to adjust the level of teaching materials in the class, the first step is to know your students. I totally agree with Martin on this point.
ReplyDeleteSometimes the class can go to the way that is not expected when the lesson plan is prepared. To have a back up plan can be always helpful. Using pictures and computer aids is always helpful. Showing video clips in the class can be a good medium for teaching English. When I observed the teaching demos, I was thinking that I should always check the teaching materials before the class; whether they are working properly. What if the video clip is not working? What if the computer is not working?
Going back to the basic for teaching, I could summarize what I learned from teaching demos; preparation and knowing your students.
During the lesson demos I have learn knew ways of teaching different subjects and I also have accrued ideas for other lessons. One activity that was fun to played was the charades, the teacher had a good ideas were ever one participated and it also teacher a hard topic for students to participate. One thing that I learn not to do was to not give a subject that you were not familiar with and learn and not to give to much information at ones were the students could come overwhelm. I have to learn how to be more outspoken and also learn new techniques of how to take control over the. Also, I learn that to tech you have to be confident in your self and on what you are teaching. No having experience in teaching can become overwhelming but the different ideas that the students brought to the table gave me an understanding of what I have to acquired and that it is ok to make some mistakes.
ReplyDeleteI don’t feel that any one teaching aspect will define a good teacher. I think what defines a teacher their negotiation between the style of the teaching and the type of class being taught. Through these teaching demos I’ve seen a large variety of teaching styles and class learning expectations, and I’ve begun to filter what might work for me and what wouldn’t. The lessons I enjoyed watching the most had more of a student focus onto it. we all have room to improve and we should all learn not only from what people do well at but also where they messed up. Also through comments made that address the same issues; I’ve seen areas where I need to improve on directly and indirectly due to underlying problems not addressed in the comments. One thing I learned from the second demo about myself is my time management. My perception of 10 minutes is apparently not the same that is defined by physics which leads to rushing through the lesson and confused classmates.
ReplyDeleteI think that it is a wonderful opportunity to get to see such a varied group of people teaching a variety of lessons. I think it has given me ideas for so many different ways to approach teaching and what types of activities you can do with students of all ages and abilities.
ReplyDeleteI have no teaching experience at all so the demos for me can be a bit nerve wracking but also helpful. This last demo for me was really a lesson on time management. I had planned a bit much for 10 minutes worth of lesson and ending up trying to rush through to do everything I wanted to do. In doing that, I think I lost a lot of the student interaction that I had planned to include.
I now realize how important is to to make sure your lesson plan fits your class length whether it's 10 minutes of an hour and a half.
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ReplyDeleteFirst, the demos enabled me to better distinguish between what a student-centered and instructor-centered language teaching approach looks like, and how a student-centered approach can be more fun and more effective. (All the language classes I've taken so far have been instructor-centered, so that teaching style was is really all I'd ever known until now!) From presenting my own demos, I learned that I personally need to center lessons more on the students than myself, providing students more opportunities to engage with and discuss the concepts being taught rather than just dumping information on them. Because I hadn't had the chance to teach a full class of students before these demos, it was even helpful just to practice speaking in front of a class and to determine what kind of teaching persona I have.
ReplyDeleteBecause I want to teach college-age or adult students, I've wondered in the past whether or not games would be appropriate or desirable for learners of these maturity levels. However, I was pleasantly surprised how well some of the games worked for other teachers whose demos were intended for college-age or adult learners. After these demos, I see that it's okay to give any age-level class the chance to move around a bit – incorporating some physical activity can be fun!
I also noticed that the use of Power Points can be very effective, time-saving (less chalkboard-writing!), and can allow students to follow along in class better. Especially when introducing new vocabulary, it seems that including images on the slides can keep students visually engaged with the material. Finally, I learned that role-plays can better assess students' speaking ability when they include opportunities for creative use of language (rather than just scripted dialogue.)
Oh, and along the lines of what Iya mentioned about “dead time,” I think the demos were a great motivation to make every second of teaching time count. When you only have 10 minutes to teach a lesson, any dead time is painfully obvious. After presenting my first demo to class, I noticed that it ended up a little slow and had a lot of pauses, so I tried to increase the amount of activities I included in my second lesson, which seemed to work better.
William Mastropieri observes:
ReplyDeleteYes, It is interesting and fun to be facing students of my own country. They did indeed return feedback. They saw how I conducted my self and the lesson. But students of my own country are not English students. They already know the language. I learned how to use and appreciate Power Point. Lessons should be fun, not too demanding and at a pace that keeps them on their toes. I really liked it when I taught a lesson and before students knew it, it was time to go home. I want to be funny especially when teaching children. We should be educated vaudevillians. I am much more courageous in teaching overseas students than Americans.
This practice reminds me on the importance of
PREPARATION. Also how to execute the material.
My lesson was too ambitious. I realized this
about 4 hours before my teaching demo. I wanted my students to know what kind of questions to expect in an interview. Facial and body language is quite important. I overloaded it with what I wanted my fellow classmates to expect in a interview for a university teaching interview.
We teachers seem to be always on guard in
expecting the unexpected.
"Know your students". I can't do that the first day. It comes with time!
We must realize the importance of clear, accurate, simple, and concise instructions.
Students want to know what is expected of them.
William Mastropieri