Records of Teaching Practice

  First Lesson: Grade 3 The next lesson that I taught was a grade 3 class in which I was introducing the topic of maps. Overall it was a pretty simple lesson and the class picked up on the vocabulary and ideas in the topic really easily so I found that the students were either finished really fast or getting bored really quickly. It was tricky to manage because of this but it worked out well in the end.  I started off with moving the class to the carpet at the back of the room where I asked all of the students to sit in a circle before putting a map in the middle for everyone to see. It was the same map that they had in their textbooks so for those who couldn’t see, I asked to look at the books too. First, we went over the keywords in the textbook, rock, path, forest, car park, picnic area, bridge waterfall and river. To my surprise, they picked up on these really fast and were able to name all of the keywords really fast. But this made it easy to move on to the next activity....

Microteaching - Grade 5   As with the previous one, the next set of microteaching activities was done in a single grade 5 class, this took a span of 2x45min lessons in which the students were reading on the topic of volcanos. I have attached my lesson plan for this class and overall, everything went pretty smoothly as we were able to get through the whole lesson plan without many issues. This was likely because it was a grade 5 class with about 16 students and I was a new teacher for them, making them more focused and non-disruptive. The first activity with which I started the lesson was a YouTube video ( https://youtu.be/lAmqsMQG3RM?feature=shared ) about volcanos. It was a simple and easy-to-understand introduction to open up the lesson. After the lesson, my tutor mentioned that she liked that I used the video, stating that she had used that exact video before. In my previous job in Korea, we often had CLIL lessons (about 10 per semester) which we as the teachers had to plan, sha...

  Micro Teaching (1) For my micro-teaching activities, I did all of the activities within the same classroom and the same lesson but divided it into clear activities which I will discuss in this section. The total amount of activities for these lessons amounted to three full class lessons and these took place in a grade 2 classroom. To start off, as it was my first direct teaching experience, I was somewhat nervous, which is to be expected, as it was a new environment with which I was somewhat unfamiliar, however, while I was nervous it wasn't as bad as I had expected. As I have some previous experience with teaching English, albeit in a different situation, my past experiences helped with this one more than I anticipated. For context, I have previously taught English full-time in South Korea over a period of a year, which in normal circumstances would have completely prepared me for the kind of teaching I had to do here. However, due to COVID restrictions, all of my lessons were h...

Teacher Talk/Student Talk In this part of my observation, I focused on what and how the teacher talks in the lessons and how the students reply to them and overall how they engage with the teacher in the target language. The first thing that is worth noting is that the variation of teacher/student talk depends on the part of the lesson that is taking place. For example, in the introduction of new vocabulary, the teacher will do the majority of the talking. This is why it is important that the student's language practice is varied and long enough for them to be able to practice and talk in the target language. When it comes to the introduction of new concepts, it is important to ask questions to see if the students understand the concepts. I have witnessed a mix of different methods in which this is done, group answering, when everyone in the class calls out the answers, being one of them. This allows for a general view of student understanding and also allows the students who may n...

Error Management In this section of my observation, I paid attention to the error management and corrections that the teacher gave to the students, how and when she did and the impact that this had on the students overall. In general, errors are very different and widespread across the different grades and levels, but here are some that I paid closer attention to and noticed occurring more commonly. Pronunciation: One of the most common errors that I have seen from students in general is based on pronunciation. This is always something that is a large issue and has to be monitored and checked throughout as fossilization can happen a lot within these types of errors, especially when it comes to the older classes and sentence formations. Pronunciation corrections also depend on what words need to be corrected and at what stage in the lesson. Keywords can be corrected by having the class repeat after the teacher multiple times to get the correct sounds. An example of this happened with th...