ENGLISH PEDAGOGY

STUDENT TEACHING PRACTICE

OBSERVATION STAGE

Name of student: Claudia Cárdenas Vargas

Name of School: Paul Harris
Date: September 8th
Class: 6º A – 4ºB
Number of students: 26 - 24

Task 1: The School and Learning Environment

1. The school:

The Paul Harris School is located in Forestal, Viña del Mar and it is a
state school. Most children who go there are in social risk and come
from vulnerable homes.
At present, the school receives 447 students distributed in 18 classes
from “Pre Kinder” to 8th Grade.
Currently there are 30 people working in the school (between
teachers, and assistants)
In terms of infrastructure the school counts with 18 classrooms, 1
Computer laboratory room, 1 classroom for special education, a
kitchen-dinning room, bathrooms, changing rooms, under cover
playground, Principal’s Office, Teachers’ room, Library and a pool.

The Paul Harris School’s vision is to be recognized as an innovative

school academically and affectively engaged in order to develop the
necessary abilities, skills, competences and also a self improvement
spirit in his students in order to succeed in their future.

The school mission is to form students through effective pedagogical

processes that allow them to develop the right competences to solve
everyday problems and face difficulties everything with the students’
families help and support.
Some of the school values are: Responsibility, honesty, perseverance,
tolerance and solidarity.

The school also is within a healthy plan which promotes sport and
good habits.

From my point of view the school is really worried about children and
all of the personal, including the principal, the teachers and the
teaching assistants try to their best to contribute with the school
duty.

2. The classroom

Classrooms are spacious and count with enough light. Although

classrooms have big windows, so the air is constantly changing,
sometimes they are not enough for ventilate the room so you can
always open the classroom door.

Every student counts with a locker to keep their school materials and
at the end of the room they have places were they can hang their
school bag.

All rooms have a whiteboard and more than one eraser, a trash can
and a broom. The teacher is always worried about the room to be
cleaned and delivered it in the same conditions as it was delivered to
him.

The school counts with English dictionaries, radio and data so the
teacher has different resources to work.

At the end of the room on the wall students have their week schedule
and some other information about good habits, maps and some
contents of other classes.

3. The activities & resources

a) The activities used in the classroom were mainly the activities that
appeared in the book. Some days extra activities were used like
guides with exercises.
There are 26 students in the classroom and from that number I think
six or seven students are totally interested in the class. The rest of
the students the teacher has to call their attention with a little more
effort and differently.
The teacher is focused on helping students to be more independent in
terms of learning so he has set out a strategy of self learning.
Students have to look up for words in the dictionary and try to deduce
meaning without help, so they can adapt this strategy in tests,
everyday activities like internet and chat.

b) The common resources used in the classroom are the students’

books, data, dictionaries, radio, the book CD. The teacher tries to use
these resources at maximum to make the class a little bit more
interesting than only books and grammar.

Task 2: Student ´s learning

1. The learners

The Paul Harris students are students that come from vulnerable
houses so they are not as motivated for classes as they are supposed
to be. Some of them even do not care if they have bad marks but if
we insist a little and push them to work they seem to understand
things and pay attention. The only thing is that that motivation is not
enough for making them work every class. They expect the teacher to
explain everything they have to do and they do not want to work so
sometimes and extra incentive is necessary.

2. Behavior during classroom activities

The teacher gives little shores to some students, particularly the

trouble ones so they feel special and encourage them to work so the
students who work receive a special shore like getting the radio and
the data for the class, looking for the dictionaries if they are in other
rooms, distributing dictionaries to their classmates, keeping the room
clean so the student that have his place clean can leave the room
first than the others.

There are some students with special need that have to go to special
classes and do not participate in the English class; some other
students take pills so the teacher must be attentive to them if they do
not take those pills. Other students have issues at home so they have
to be treated with extra care.

3. Discuss the learning styles and levels of English in the

classroom.

Students have different learning styles and some of them have

advantages in English. They know more vocabulary and have a better
pronunciation than others. Also there are students that understand
really fast the contents.
In some cases, students only need the instructions and they work
alone. Other students need the presence of the teacher because they
take more time in understanding instructions and the activities. And
some students really need the teacher to be pushing them to work
because they get easily distracted and begin doing other stuff like
drawing or writing.

TEAM TEACHING STAGE

Name of student: Claudia Cárdenas Vargas

Name of School: Paul Harris
Date: September 8th
Class: 6º A
Number of students: 26

Task Nº1: Collaboration activities

For the following questions describe as accurately as you can

how you have collaborated in school assigned:

1. What kind of activity did you perform the first time you
were asked for help? How long did it take?

The teacher asked me to read loudly a text that is in the students’

book in order to help them to listen to different accents in English. It
was a text about a school board and activities for the weekend. The
activity took like 10 minutes because we read the text twice. The
teacher also told me to help students to do the activities that
appeared in the book and later help him correct those activities and
that took the entire class period.

2. What were the students doing before you started helping

out?

Some students were working; other students were talking, playing,

drawing and writing love letters.
3. How did the students react? Describe the atmosphere of
the room and the levels of engagement in the room.

Students realize that there were two teachers in the room watching
out that they had to work so the majority of the students worked in
their books and asked me for help.
It was really difficult for me to engage students with the activities,
some of them have problems and you have to treat them differently
than the rest of the students. In some opportunities the teacher had
to raise his voice to be listened.
The English period is from 14:20 to 15:55 so I assume that students
are tired at that moment of the day so they need some extra
incentive for working.

4. What other assignments were asked you to do? How often?

I was asked to do a power point presentation with information about

regular and irregular verbs and also two guides with exercises for the
test.
The other activities that I was asked to do were similar, to help
students with their doubts, to read loudly, etc.

5. Were you asked to prepare any kind of special audio visual

material learning material for the students? Were they used?
How effective were they?

As I said before, I was asked to do a power point presentation. This

material I think was effective because it was full of images and
examples of the topic seen before.
The teacher used the power point presentation and he explained it to
the students.

Task 2: Lesson Planning

Answer the following questions and explain how you planned

the learning activities for your students. Be as precise as you
can.

1. How did you get the information for planning the lessons
for your students?

I got the information for planning the lessons from the students’ book
and internet.
The information of the contents and the activities I extracted it from
the book.
Other examples of how to teach those contents and more activities
were extracted from internet.
2. Did your guide teacher give you any suggestions for
planning?

He helped me with the lesson plan and we correct it. He explained me

what I have to do in the different stages of the class.

3. How long did it take to you to prepare learning material for

your first lesson?

Preparing learning material form my first class and doing the lesson
plan took me two hours; creating exercises, looking for information in
internet and choosing the best activities to do.