TESL 0170 Practicum - Teaching Lesson 1 Reflection
For today’s lesson, I covered the first half of Chapter 3:
Part 2 of textbook “Real Talk 2: Authentic English in Context”, which focussed
on banking. The lesson began with a bit of a bumpy start due to a technical
difficulty. I was unable to get the projector to connect up to my laptop, so I
started the class with introductions and a class discussion to prime the students
on the topic. Once the projector was up and working, I was then able to play a
game of Kahoot with the class to review vocabulary from the previous lesson, as
well as introduce new words using a PowerPoint presentation. The students
especially enjoyed the game of Kahoot, and it served as a great way to connect
with the students. After having a ten-minute break, we then moved on to the
listening component of the lesson, where students listened to a conversation
between a bank employee and a customer. The listening material appeared to be
difficult for a good number of the students, so to give them a break, I changed
course and had the students work in pairs to compare and discuss information about
two banks. I decided to save the last
listening activity for my next class on Friday.
What worked well:
Coming into this lesson I was well prepared, with a good
variety of activities planned, as well as a few back up activities. In addition
to this, I am happy that I was able to adapt my lesson around not having the
projector initially. It really threw me off guard, but fortunately I had
activities that did not require the projector which I was able to do first. I found
that having the students introduce themselves and share their favourite food
was a simple and fun way to get to know the students; many of them shared foods
from their home countries, which was interesting to learn about! Calling the
students by name also helped build rapport with them, however there are still a
few students whose names I still need to work on! The game of Kahoot was a huge
success in reviewing the vocabulary from last class. The students were eager to
participate and had a lot of fun. It also allowed me to gauge where everyone was
at coming into my first class. The student pairings I created promoted good
dynamics in the classroom, which helped the students be productive.
Things to tweak:
Due to the nature of this chapter (finances), the material
that needs to be covered is rather dense and may be unfamiliar to many of the students.
I found that the some of the students struggled to grasp some of the
vocabulary, as many of them are very abstract concepts, and can be difficult to
explain. As such, I hope to focus more on illustrating the vocabulary in my
next lesson. The audio recording as well had quite a bit of information, so next
time I think I’ll let the students follow along with the transcript during the
second playthrough. Also, I was told by my practicum teacher that I need to
slow down my speech a little to make it easier for the students to follow. Therefore,
for my next class, I’ll be more mindful of my speed. Lastly, I think I could
have incorporated more opportunities for students to produce language. In my
next class I will focus on incorporating more opportunities for students to
produce language through activities like role plays, dialogues, and short
answer questions. Overall, while there
were several areas that I need to improve upon, I feel that it went well and
was an incredibly valuable first experience for me! I look forward to teaching
my next lesson.
Etienne, after reading your lesson plan and the description of how you used Kahoot, I finally understand how it works! I'm going to try it in my final teaching day. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI think you'll have fun using it! What I especially like about Kahoot is that it emails you a diagnostic report of the game, and gives you information on how often each student answered correctly and incorrectly for each word. This allows you to see which students are struggling with what words, so you can focus on them in the future.
ReplyDelete