This week I completed my eighth hour of teaching. In this lesson my teaching partner and I reviewed the skills we have been working on with the class for the past few weeks. We decided to use this lesson as practice for our final evaluation next week, so we did not try anything new, with the exception of our exit activity. This lesson focused primarily on summarizing, with a bit of focus on pronunciation.

At the beginning of the class, my teaching partner and I asked the students to complete a short survey to evaluate our teaching. We asked them about what they have learned in the class, how they have felt about their experience in the class, and how well they have been able to understand our delivery. The response in the survey was quite positive and the students indicated that our lessons have been useful to them and that they found it to be an interesting and relaxed class. It was gratifying to hear this positive feedback and to know that I have actually helped my students over the past two months.

Overall, the class went well this week. We followed roughly the same format as last week, opening with watching and summarizing a video for a warm-up, then moving into discussions, presentations, and listening practice. This week I was once again impressed by the level of participation in the class. I have seen major growth from all of the students in their confidence in speaking English. Last week one of the quietest students volunteered to be the first one to answer in an activity, and this week my other quietest student volunteered to go first. This increase in confidence and participation in the class as a whole has shown me that my students really are improving their English skills.

The one new thing my partner and I tried in this class was a pronunciation-based exit activity. Throughout the class we listened for words each student was mispronouncing, and at the end of the class I assigned them each two words. I had all of the students repeat after me to practice pronouncing all of the words, then I had each student use one of their words in a sentence. This activity was successful and I heard an improvement in everyone’s pronunciation of the words. I was also impressed by the students’ effort in this activity as I only asked them to use one of their words in a sentence but many of them used both.

Next week will be my second-last week of teaching and I will have my second evaluation. I think my partner and I have been feeling good about our teaching and lesson delivery for the past few weeks so we will more or less continue what we have been doing. In the last evaluation my practicum advisor commented that he wished our students turned on their cameras more, which is the element of participation that is still lacking in the class. Next week I will make sure to encourage the students to use their cameras and I am hoping that they have become comfortable enough in our classroom to do so.