Reflections
When I started this course, I did it with so many expectations of myself. It seemed very interesting for me the content of the whole course, so I got in.
My main goals by the end of this course is to grow up as a good teacher, taking into consideration my personal motivation, the students' needs and our ability to work together as a group. I always have considered that learning from your students as well as they learn from you, is one of the most important things in the learning process. It can be achieved if you know how to create the perfect environment inside the classroom.
On the other hand, when we discussed about lesson planning, I remembered a lot of things that I was about to forget. That's why I work with kids at my own English Academy and I don't use a lesson plan itself. My classes are planned by levels and divided into lessons, and that's it. But having a lesson plan could be absolutely useful. It helps you to memorize and organize what you teach, what your students learn and to establish an aim.
I would like to teach English in a practical way, not only grammatical, because grammar tend to be boring to the students and when you are creating a lesson plan, you have to remember that it will be based on your students, not based on the teacher. I prefer to focus on working with real material and real examples to make them be in touch with the language itself. I personally believe that what I do well is to keep a balance between written exercises and oral exercises, sometimes I use too much grammar or only written exercises and that didn't go so well, and if I do another lesson plan again, I would take into consideration the ages, strengths, weaknesses and other important aspects of my students.
This can be applied for the use of:
Technology inside the classroom: I show multimedia material to my students in order to make them work with songs in English, which is something I do well. But sometimes my students want to do another thing on the computer not related with the content I was trying to teach, so technology can be distracting sometimes, that didn't go so well, so that's why I can use the tools I learnt here in this course, such as comics creator, word games, web pages, and so on to make my students have fun while they're learning.
Teaching grammar: every teacher knows that grammar is important but it is a part of speech difficult to explain. I teach very well all the structures, but there are many structures that can be confusing to the students and teachers should adapt the content to the students to make them understand better. Something that didn't go so well is the fact that all students think that grammar is only used in written language. It's true, it is used in written language but it doesn't mean that they are not going to use the structure in oral language anymore. So, what would I change? I would change their concept about grammar maybe applying inductive or deductive methods and also, I can use visual aids or songs to explain a grammatical structure, written or orally.
Teaching vocabulary: one of the things I know I do really well is repetitions drills for teaching vocabulary. Kids love to repeat the words I say and play with them. What didn't go so well is trying to apply the same strategy with teenagers. Sometimes they don't pay attention to the teacher, they don't want to be treated like parrots, so that's when I try to combine simple vocabulary they are used to use every day with their equivalent in English. That went well because, for teenagers, is a not-so-formal way of learning and recording new vocabulary and they feel more comfortable about it.
