Teaching practicum II: Adolescents

 

Teaching practicum II has been an amazing experience due to the fact that, it comes from a short group to a big one, so my classmates and I had a big opportunity to teach in an environment real like class because there were more than 15 students; moreover, there were some important moments occurred during this process that help me to develop myself as a teacher. Besides, there were many comments from the observer teachers that guided me to improve my weaknesses because every time I had to teach I took all those aspects into account in order to overcome them; therefore teaching practicum II allowed me to experience how to become a teacher.

 

At the beginning of this practice I experienced a soft way of teaching because it was a short group of students and I found the way to manage them. They participated and behaved well during the classes. However, almost at the end of practice I had a new experience due to the fact that my group was joined with another group of teens which represented a great challenge for me because by then the student group was bigger than the other one and I had to be prepared to guide them in the learning process. Thus, when I taught my first class, I noticed that this group needed more monitoring, and motivation in the way of eliciting them to use the L2 (Second Language) as a tool to communicate among them and with the teacher.

 

Moreover, there were three important moments occurred during this teaching practicum. The first one was in my second teaching practicum class because the observer teachers told me that in general all was right because I developed my lesson plan in the way that each activity allowed students to be ready for the next one, and also I let them practice and produce by themselves. Second one was in one class before the last one when I was presenting vocabulary of natural places from El Salvador. I could notice that all the students knew about them, which made the class interesting for them because they were very active during the whole class, so that at the production stage they were able to talk about their favorite natural place. And the last one was in my last class in the production part when I asked them to draw the places from their hometown, it was really funny and helpful because they drew not only places they had studied but also places they already know like drug store, tortillas factory, and so on. At the end when I asked them to describe it in pairs they did it correctly.

 

As I said at the beginning, there were many comments from the observer teachers that guided me to improve my weaknesses because every time I had to teach I took all those aspects into account in order to overcome them. Thus, to improve them I had to find new strategies and make those strategies part of my classes. Therefore, each class represented for me a big challenge to improve. It was not really easy because not all the classes ended as I expected, but practice makes better teachers.

 

All in all, this teaching practicum II was full of surprises in which as teachers we learned from the beginning how to become better teacher putting into practice our knowledge helping others learning a second language. Personally it gave me the opportunity to receive feedback from observer teachers which was really helpful because I had to find the way to improve and they could witness my improvements in every class. Consequently, there were special moments which I appreciate because it let me feel in the right way and love my profession.