TESL 0170 - Assignment #2 Teaching/Self-evaluation report
The experience of teaching adults through this practicum has taught me a great deal about myself as a teacher. Teaching during this practicum taught me both about my strengths as a teacher and some areas in which I could improve.
Throughout my practicum, I worked hard to engage with the learners, learn their names, and create plans that get them involved in learning at a deeper level. As a result of my experience teaching in the past, I have learned how to project my voice and make eye contact with learners. Making eye contact, engaging with learners, and projecting my voice, I believe, all help to create rapport between myself and the learners in a way that makes them feel more comfortable and able to participate more fully in class.
One of the most important parts of teaching a lesson for me is the use of comprehension checks. Throughout my lessons, I try to include easy comprehension checks to make sure learners are understanding what I am trying to teach. These comprehension checks allow me to not only assess their understanding of the material, but also to better evaluate my own teaching and the materials I am using for this particular lesson.
In an Intensive English Program, timing is very important because the courses are short with a great deal of content. I tend to over-plan for lessons and more experience teaching these short, intensive courses could help me better organize class time.
Related to the short timing of some ESL courses, I ran into trouble attempting to effectively creates groups for group activities. During my lessons, I got more comfortable with changing the groups up, but still had difficulties making sure that the groups were equitable. Having equitable groups would help the learners get the most out of group projects.
Finally, I sometimes tend to get too “wordy” and can make myself seem unclear to learners. I give many examples throughout lessons and this may confuse the learners rather than provide more nuance like I hope it will. Being more concise is something that I worked on throughout my practicum and I believe, with more practice, I will become more concise and clear for learners.
In the future, I would love to get more experience teaching ESL. I really enjoyed my experience, and many of my areas of improvement are areas that come with experience (according to my discussions with the sponsor teacher).
I am very happy with the evaluations that I got from learners. While they were not as reflective as I had hoped, the learners pointed out that the activities I chose were interesting, I made time to answer questions, and I gave them time to understand and work with the material. One evaluation of interest to me was from a learner that said I did not speak clearly and at a good speed. This surprised me as all of the others were positive and said I spoke clearly and at a good pace. This made me think about how to approach talking and if there is a way for me to speak slower. The other evaluation that surprised me was from a student who gave more detail as to how I helped and thanked me for spending time on vocabulary.
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