SECOND POST TEACHING REFLECTION

The first thing that I loved about this lesson is that I think its a true refle ction of my teaching philosophy. I really like to teach things that students feel are relevant and will help them achieve their own goals in education. I saw on a few of their before-break reflections that they want pronunciation practice, and they really do need it because of the Vietnamese tendency to leave the final sound off the end of words. Therefore, I put pronunciation practice into the language objectives and tried to model correct pronunciation with my own speech with slightly exaggerated diction throughout the lesson. I think this was a successful idea because one student thanked me for doing that after class. I also knew that I wanted to have a theme about education, as all but two of us in this class (students included) are teachers, yet we all come from such different worlds. I had an opportunity to talk about this idea with some of the students before spring break, and they mentioned they would really like to learn more about the US educational system. I was very excited to teach a topic that I knew we are all passionate and interested in. This topic also gave me an opportunity to have some robust content objectives, because my first lesson was weaker in this since it was the start of the class. Strangely, I felt like I was still the guinea pig during this lesson, because I was still the very first person to go for the second wave of lessons. Midway through planning we got a new unknown teacher with different expectations. The changes in types of feedback were a new challenge. Of course, I generally think the more feedback the better because it can help me improve, but I felt the time frame that I had with which to incorporate all of the feedback was unfortunately tight. This said, I stopped feeling overwhelmed when I actually started to teach. Because of these difficulties, I feel like planning may be my weakest area, which is really good to know for future teaching.

SECOND POST TEACHING REFLECTION This second lesson I was very conscious of time given that we went down from 45 to 40

minutes per lesson. I taught myself (finally) how to make a PowerPoint presentation, and used this to guide the lesson. I thought it would just be to help the students visually (they got a printout so they didnt have to take notes), but it actually helped me too, because it acts like an outline to keep you on track. I think Ill probably start using PPs more. One of the coachs feedback with my lesson plan was amazingly helpful. I eliminated half of the vocabulary to keep the lesson within the 40 minute time frame. I also made a judgment call during the lesson to axe the gallery walk because it would have taken too long, and students were really enjoying working together on their Venn Diagrams. Im very pleased with the on-the-spot decision to give students extra practice speaking by sharing briefly with the class. I wasnt sure about my decision to give more instruction than we often do in this class during the vocabulary. If I could do the lesson again, I would call on students to read the definitions and sentences aloud to incorporate more interaction. I should have remembered that in a 40 minute lesson, the teacher really cant afford to talk as much as I did. I also wasnt sure how the non-participatory classmates would feel about the reading component the students did, because there was a lot of silence during this activity. However, in a real classroom setting individual work is common and useful, because it gives a chance for everyone to work at their own pace, collecting their thoughts and preparing ideas to have a successful discussion. Fortunately, this seemed to happen successfully for the most part, and I was really happy to hear students using the vocabulary and referring to the reading during the discussions, much more than I thought they would. Overall, I feel that this lesson was a big improvement from my first, and that the students engagement and participation reflected this.