Dear FLE 404 members,
In this assignment, you need to describe a positive learning experience and a negative one during your practice teaching period that you think have played a significant role in your professional and personal development during your practice teaching by providing details and examples. You need to illustrate what you learnt from these experiences, in what ways these experiences are significant and critical in your professional and personal development and in what ways they contributed to you, in what ways you think these experiences have affected your teacher identity.
In one of the teachings, I usually let the volunteers talk during the lesson. my mentor teacher told me I should have made the others talk, too because some of them were shy students. this was a very good experience for me because I usually focused on the ones who raised their hands and ignored the others so that the lesson would move smoothly. But I understood it was wrong. another experience is that I used a very enjoyable activity for one of the teachings and students were very motivated fr the lesson. then, I concluded that the warm-up is a very important phase for the lesson to be enjoyable.
ReplyDeletethe thing that i have learned form practice teaching is to balance between the teaching and letting students to perform and act. it is very difficult and the most difficult part in teaching and in being a teacher. if there is no balance between them nor teaching nor learning will be effective. moreover, during the practice teaching i understand that being close to the students will help me make them love the language.
ReplyDeleteIn one my teaching tasks, I made the students write a dialogue taking place between the chracters in the story that they were reading. After they finshed writing, I asked them to role-play their dialogues. During the role play one of the students made a prononciation mistake which I immediately corrected. While giving feedback, my mentor teacher told me that in the activities focusing on fluency like the one I did, immediate feedback is not recommended.
ReplyDeleteAs for the positive experience, in my final teaching I asked the students to write a few sentences about music, and place them under the right music type that they learned in the lesson. The students were really motivated ,and produced such good sentences that I was amazed. Then I realized the importance of internalization, and relating the topic to their own lives and interests.
In almost all of my teachings, I made revision lessons, which can only go well. I taught a new thing twice and they, too went well. However, 2 of my 3 mentors said that I should speak more loudly even though I am sure every one in the class could hear me well.
ReplyDeleteOthers were all positive experiences, best of which is when I taught literature to a class of a teacher who was too hard on them. He teaches above their level, only asking questions without getting any answer from students. I made a competition, divided them into 3 groups, assigned different parts of the story and asked them to find cause-effect relationships and the group who finds more, is the winner. They enjoyed it a lot also while grasping the whole idea of the story.
On one of the school experience day, I realized a girl who was really shy and didn't want to participate in lesson during the teaching task. Then in the break I asked her why she didn't try to answer my questions or why she didn't trust herself. We talked for a while and she promised that she studied hard and from that time she would try to do sth. Also she gave me her bracelet which was very important for me because it was the first time that I got a present from my student. This was a good experience for me and I understood that I should respect and love all my students and try to contact with all of them. As a negative experience, one day in the teaching of Gülden there was a word in the activity "ski". as it was read like a swearing in Turkish. they started to laugh but it was really annoying because it wasn't funny and it was a simple word. That was really negative experience both for Gülden and me. after that I understood that I must examine and choose the text carefully before coming to class. Also in my real life when I become a teacher, I will tell my students that those words are really normal and explain them it was so annoying to behave like children due to a pronounciation of a word.
ReplyDeleteon my first teaching task I was really disappointed. our mentor teacher did not mention about the students more. she gave me some materials and when I asked about the Students knowledge she said that they know all the previous topics pretty well, and I prepared my lesson according to that. Students did not know anything that they supposed to Know. And I was really confused and did not know what to do. it was really bad experience for me.
ReplyDeletea good one is the second teaching task. i prepared games for them. all of the students participated in the lesson and I was a little bit aware of their background knowledge. it was good lesson.
When I tried to remember an experience from practise teaching that contributed to me in terms of new insights and perspectives, I found out the following: One day, I was teaching grammar: some/any/a/an. After I provided a context for the structure and the students had the chance to internalize the structure through various activities, I felt the need to give the structure and display the differences between these forms. While making an explanation for “some”, I said that in English, unlike Turkish, we did not say one bread but some bread. The sts were very surprised and could not understand why it was that way. The situation developed in such a way that the way English speakers think did not make any sense to the children and looked ridiculous. I was the one responsible for this inconvenience and could not give a reasonable explanation for this difference. This experience had new implications for me. I learnt how important it was to present everything in a logical way and be ready for any type of questions that I can face due to the differences between the native language of the sts and the target language.
ReplyDeleteMy best experiance was when I tried o teach grammar to my students. They were so focused on the lesson that they wrote everything on the board without any complain. I was so happy to see all of them motivated and I tought the second lesson as well. The worst lesson or session for me was when I tried to instructions about a handout. I could not express it clearly so the children were doing whatever came to their minds. I was so helpless and desperate that I asked my mentor teacher to help me. I learned that as a teacher we need to be specific and clear about the instructions.
ReplyDeleteMy 3. teaching task was a bad experience for me. I wa supposed to practice two of the tenses that the students have learned before. One of them was simple present which was taught by the mentor teacher and the other one was the present continuous tense which we taught. I had prepared some worksheets and speaking activities. However the students couldn't remember simple present tense and I was not ready to teach a grammer topic again. I was confused for a second then I tried to solve the problem. As a result I have learned that I should ready for an unexpected situation at the time of the teaching.Also I have learned that at the very beginning of the lesson I should summarize the given information.
ReplyDeleteAt teaching task 2, I asked two of my students to come to the board. In order to teach a vocabulary I told one of them to pretend to beat his friend. He really beat his friend and I was shocked. All of the students were laughing and they were distracted from the lesson due to the event. I wanted to use authentic material but it was at the wrong place and wrong time. After that I decided not to give examples related to violance to the yound learners. It was an interesting experience for me.
ReplyDeleteOne of my positive experience was related to choice of material. I used 2 minutes long song for warm up phrase and I could not belive how much they were motivated. Sometimes only two minutes can motivate young learners and this is why I like teaching them.
ın my final teaching of last term, I used "was" instead of "were" and one students said "hahaha was dedi", the others laughed. I did not know hot to react, so I learned the importance of classrooom management.A teacher should be ready for the obstacles in the lesson. I think this readiness will arise by time as you gain experience.
ReplyDeleteduring this term, I projected the word document activities via projector and wanted the students to come to board and do the activities on the board. I see that this really works and the students are more alert during the activities.
Generally, my monitoring and checking students were succesfull so I think my classroom management was good. Negatively, I did not prepare any other activity for students about any topic I just followed the book as my mentor teacher said me.
ReplyDeleteMy negative experiences are about grammar teaching. Our mentor teacher was obssessed to traditional grammar teaching method and she claimes that Gazi University is the best in Turkey in teaching English we don't know what to do and how to do. Our teachers are all theoratical they don't know practical information. Another issue is writing on the board... She claims again that we have to write the rules and examples on the board and make the ss write them down to their notebooks. She says that "they have a special and emotional bound of a handwritten text".
ReplyDeleteapart from grammar teaching and our mentor teacher's thoughts and ideas on it, I all had positive experiences. The most positive one is that at the beginning of the semestr he students there called us "trainees" but when we were leaving they called us "our teachers" "hoşça kalın öğretmenlerim" I think this is the proof that we have changed the profile of us in their mind positively.
For the positive one, I could remember the lesson in which I was teaching the illnesses and health problems. For that lesson I prepared 12 A4 flash cards, on which pictures of different illnesses were. I asked a student to come to the board and try to act like the sick person on the picture. He acted perfectly and I asked to the others what the matter with him was. They answered and I stuck the picture on the board. I wrote the answer next to the picture and I also wanted them to write the same answer next to the related picture on their worksheets which I had given them before. I continued the activity each time with different volunteers till all the illnesses are dealt with.
ReplyDeleteThe visuals and the students’ being integrated into the lesson actively made them really motivated about the ongoing lesson and the number of students who wanted to participate in the activity was very high.
After that experience, I realized the importance of visuals and addressing to visual and bodily-kinesthetic intelligences. And from my peer’s, Selman’s experiences, I also realized that even 7th graders are young learners, in terms of the activity types they enjoy and things from which they got motivated.
For the negative one; in a lesson with 4th graders, while checking the answers with the students, I didn’t write the whole answers on the board, just wrote the missing parts and I also did not numbered the answers. I thought that it was enough, because they had the worksheets on their desks. But half of the students’ worksheet started to seem like a mess. Fortunately I got aware of it before it is too late. Though, it cost me a few extra minutes of course.
What I learned from it… Actually one thing; they are still children. As I mentioned, till the high school…
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteSelman Eser
ReplyDelete1529973
A positive teaching experience I could remember would be using a rather interactive activity which accounts for bodily-kinesthetic intelligence to enhance sentence formation, which Mustafa mentioned above as well. Basically, you select a number of students and give each of them a word or part of the sentence. Then you ask them to get into the correct order to form a correct sentence. We weren't sure if it would work for 7th grade learners, which aren't that young, but it turned out to be a lot better than we thought it would. We realized that 7th grader or not, they are still children and they like such changes in the tone of activities.
A negative teaching experience I could remember would be the first activity I did this semester. Although the activity was very useful in theory, the instructions were slightly complex. With the anxiety of the first teaching, I quickly gave the instructions all in English without making sure everyone understood. Some students did, but quite a few didn't seem like they did. It was a failure in the end. With this rather painful experience, I realized the importance of instructions again and worked on alternative strategies to improve my giving instructions skills, such as using demonstration, examples, elaboration and even L1 in some cases.
I had the worst experience in my assessed teaching. I prepared for my assessed teaching a few days ago by practicing several times and I was really excited to make assessed teaching but I had the shock of my life when I entered the classroom. There were only “seven” students and there were no difference between them and the dead in terms of the motivation and enthusiasm. During the lesson besides the teaching, I tried to make them motivated to participate in the lesson but I couldn’t manage. Immediately after the lesson, I became really disappointed and desperate but after a while, it made me more curios and interested in the effects of the motivation on the students’ learning and I began to research on this topic.
ReplyDeleteIn my second teaching, I integrated the popular culture products like visuals of the famous people with my teaching materials. Surprisingly, the students became really motivated on their own and began to make comments on them. I was so happy to see them like that because normally they didn’t even raise their hand to answer an easy question. In that lesson, I realized the importance of the well-prepared materials.