As of this week I am halfway through my practicum teaching hours. At this midway point, I am feeling good about my progress. This week my teaching was being evaluated, which I thought I might be nervous about, but I felt fine. My lack of nerves made me realize that I am becoming quite confident in my teaching.
Because this week was evaluation week, my partner and I based our lesson on things that worked well for us in the past, and making adjustments to things that have not worked. We focused on the topic of food and began the class by showing pictures of food with statements the students had to agree or disagree with. The students were asked to turn on their cameras, though only two out of five agreed to do so. Other than the lack of camera use, the activity went well, and everyone was participating and everyone answered every question, so I was happy with that. One area for improvement in this activity would be time. I felt like the activity moved a little too slow and took up too much class time. I think it would be easier to do this activity in person as there would be no delay with students having to turn on their microphones to answer questions. I am not sure that in the virtual space I could do anything to speed up the pace of the activity, so in the future I may just have to use fewer questions.
After the warm-up, the students did a discussion on food. Participation in the discussion was great, and I did not have to prompt the students in the group I observed at all. While everyone participated in the discussion, it seems there are some students who are consistently becoming the dominant voices in the groups. Something I might like to try in the future is assigning roles for discussions and asking certain students to be leaders, to take notes, or to argue a certain position on the topic. I think assigning roles could potentially even out the participation even more.
The discussions were followed by presentations. My partner and I recently started giving the students listening questions to answer about other students’ opinions during presentations. In the past, we showed the students the questions after the presentations, but this time we showed them before. I think this was a good strategy as the students were able to answer the questions much easier this time. The students did a good job of presenting as well, and participation was more equal than in the past because I asked the students to take turns presenting their opinions. In the next class I think I would like to introduce some language for giving presentations such as summarizing and paraphrasing language. The students are getting comfortable giving presentations with the language they already have, so I think they are ready to advance their skills.