IMPLEMENTATION OF MY TEACHING UNIT
"The implementation of my teaching practice could be described as going through a roller coaster. It should be highlighted that there have been very good days but also rough ones. I think this is what teaching is about: becoming resilient and not getting down when these rough days get in my way."
Facing obstacles
To start with, I must say that I have faced with a lot of obstacles when teaching. First of all, I was given a very small room with no enough tables nor chairs for everyone. Therefore, I had to make the students sit on the floor and this sometimes caused chaotic moments. What is more, I was all by myself so I had to handle all the critic incidents and unexpected situations on my own with no help. Furthermore, I was quite disadvantaged with the fact that my students are not used to this kind of education, that is, being sit and listening to the teacher’s explanations for a while. Although I tried to design the project the more dynamic and entertaining I could, in the first sessions I realized that they got very tired when having to pay attention in English. Thus, in some sessions I decided to reduce them to 45-minute-sessions.
In addition, the school has no specific slots of time for the English subject so my impression was that this language was given less importance, not to say none, and I highly believe that coordination needs to change this. In my opinion, there should be a clearer and more structured second language linguistic project as children have a very low English due to this bad organization.
Overcoming frustration and getting good results
Even though the feeling of frustration most of the times invaded me because of these obstacles, I did my best to overcome them with positivity, enthusiasm and resilience, above all. I want to highlight as well the positive results of the teaching practice. First, I managed to make my kids interested in English. I had the feeling that they came to my classes with enthusiasm. As for the objectives accomplished, most of the kids learnt the contents established. They easily memorized the animals and habits concepts, as it was a topic of interest for them. On contrast, the routines vocabulary, even though we revised them everyday, were harder for them to remember.
Communicative skills
Moreover, I have observed a considerable improvement on oral skills, especially listening. Throughout the sessions, they were getting used to listen English more and more, so I am happy that by the end of the project they understood most of my explanations and instructions. What helped me with this was my gestualization and the use of basic sentences. In the beginning of the course, students were incapable of understanding me in English or just basically did not try to understand me. I feel that they have broken this fear barriers that they assigned to the foreign language, and now they automatically get what I am talking about.
Regarding the oral speech communication, however, a lot of work is still needed. I tried to make kids repeat what they said in Catalan in English, but in most of the cases they only repeated the basic words, so English communicative aspects were missing a little bit.
Evaluation
It has been quite difficult to assess the students’ performances since this school’s methodology does not defend this functioning and learning is checked mainly through observation. In my practice, I tried to find other alternatives to check my kids learning process and apart from revising previous content in each session, I designed some sheets and a final assessment with a digital tool, Kahoot, which was a new discovery for them. In the final kahoot assessment, I could observe that in general , as mentioned before, they had acquired the key content of the project.
Regarding the evaluation of my own performance as an English teacher, I would say it has been good. I have been very flexible and adaptable to the situations and the methodology that I have faced to. What is more, I had no help nor support from anyone and the fact of teaching alone has helped me to develop my professional skills and learn and grow on my own as a real English teacher. Besides, I believe I have done my best to make my students understand and enjoy English in a different way and I have known how to deal with critical incidents in the classroom.
