Due to our scheduling, Seiji and I taught in the same class twice. This allowed us to create a nice rapport with the students. The day before our lesson we were asked to alter our lesson once more in order to line up more with the course objectives. This caused some stress for us however we managed to get everything done in time and felt fairly comfortable with our lesson. We began the lesson by welcoming the students and asking them some questions about their weekend and feedback about the last class. Following, we did a Kahoot review of terms and ideas from last class. This was not achieved as successfully as I had hoped although I was unsurprised. After the last class, the students were overwhelmed by the amount of material so certain aspects of the lesson may have been unattainable. I tried to give some corrective feedback on the fly about questions where there were lots of mistakes and I hope that eased the transition to this lesson. We decided we would have to slow things down and in order to do this, we did some more activities on comprehension as we thought the narrative was still partially unclear. This went well and I believe helped the students. We made it through all except one of our slides which was nice. I still struggle with the amount the students will retain as we were recommended to cover so much material. Everything went very quickly and was brushed over without many options to go too in depth. Overall, this was a positive experience that taught me lots about myself as a teacher and what I hope to accomplish.
Category: Teaching Reflections
This class was the first structured class Seiji and I taught together. It was a good experience overall. We had to change our lesson plan the day before to match up with the course instructor’s plans. This led to some amounts of extra stress as we were all set on our original plan. We accommodated though and adjusted our plan to reflect the course plan as per the instructor. We were tasked with the objective of teaching tone, narrative vs short story, theme, and comprehension through a story called “The Adventures of a Blue Eyed Ojibway”. This story had many cultural aspects that were unfamiliar to the students to it required lots of information for context. We tried to facilitate this by doing a breakout room terminology search jigsaw. This proved to be helpful but there were too many words on the jigsaw for the students and it made them anxious or frustrated as they could not understand all of the words. This activity took much longer than we had planned and also the course instructor as well as Seiji and I asked the students to turn on their cameras to introduce themselves. This alone took about 25 min and then the word search activity took about 30. This would be the theme of our lesson – too little time and too much material. This was very frustrating to experience as I felt that we were well prepared and taught relatively confidently and had good rapport with the students. It felt a little overwhelming having to teach all of this material as I believe over the course of our 2 two hour lessons there could have been material for 4 courses. The text was difficult for students as it incorporated many stereotypes being protrayed in humourus ways that require a pre existing knowledge of Indigenous-Canadian social relations. This would be difficult to delve into within 2 classes. In this class, I thought we were very present and aware of the students and their needs. I also enjoyed how Seiji and I worked together to help the students. Another point of contention is that we were not able to create breakout rooms ourselves and had to ask the instructor to create them for us. This meant we would have to in a way break the 4th wall of us being instructors to expose us as students. I mean this in the least dramatic way possible, but it was just an instance that lacked flow within our lesson. Also, because of this, we were not able to hop into breakout rooms to check on students and their progress. This meant we were in the dark as far as knowing if they were accomplishing the tasks or not. We only made it to slide 9 of 20 so about halfway. This forced us to adapt and think on the fly about how to smoothly transition out of the lesson. We adapted one of our activities and then transitioned into the -now changed homework and exit ticket. Overall the students were receptive. I was happy with our tone and rapport with students. But once again the timing and information overload for the students could have been too much.
Seiji and I taught the conversation club together as both of our first experiences within an ESL setting. The flexibility of this class was nice. It provided a nice segue into teaching for us as we could do the lesson on a multitude of subjects with a variety of objectives. We decided we would direct the students through a language lesson that would flow through the discourse of hobbies. This was interesting for us as we were able to learn lots about individual students and cultural aspects of their lives. We ushered the students through a variety of prompts to push them to open up about themselves. The students were participatory but Seiji and I would call on them individually. After reflecting on the lesson I wish that we were able to link the students and ideas better together. Unfortunately, as we would finish with one student answering we would immediately move on to the same question just with another student. We could have facilitated a more conversation-oriented dialogue by asking students to respond in some way to the previous student etc. As students we, or atleast I enjoy when my instructors use this sort of dialogue continuation between students so I was aware of it but was not able to facilitate it as I had hoped. I could credit this to my lack of experience or anxiety on calling on students or just not knowing how to initiate this type of conversation. I hope in the near future as I become more comfortable I will be able to facilitate a free-flowing classroom where students share with each other and I merely connect them together. The lesson generally went well and I felt confident about my speaking and slides but we did not have any distinct objective since this was a conversation club class. Due to this I was unable to gauge whether my lesson had been useful. If I were to teach this class again I would ensure it was more conversation between students focused rather than Seiji or I commenting and replying to each individual student. Overall I was happy with my teaching for a first time but I struggle with not knowing what the students would retain from it. However, I do know they understand what a hobby is and so due to our teaching they now have the ability to discuss with other English speakers about hobbies and the discourse that surrounds that.