Final reflections

I think that nowadays the teaching task is somehow a little bit discredited. It is said that getting the CAP certificate is a really silly and easy procedure we have to pass in order to become teachers. Does it mean that everybody can work successfully as a teacher without any problem, only by getting the CAP? I do not think so. As teachers, we have now to assume an important role. Being a part of the knowledge scaffolding process is such an important thing that deserves to be one of the main focuses of attention of our society. Assuming the importance of this role is essential to develop our task properly. Maybe I am wrong, but I think the teaching practice needs to be done by vocation. You can be waitress despite you hate it, you can be a bus driver despite you do not like driving, but from my humble opinion, you could never be a teacher if you did not feel a strong sense of vocation about it. I do not want to play the CAP training down with it. What I want to say is that, on the one hand, teachers should receive exhaustive preparation in order to work as teachers. I wonder if the new master will solve that problem. On the other hand, the vocational sense should be an indispensable requirement to be teacher. Maybe it could be solved as well with the new master, because paying more in order to et the certificate may make people think it twice, by analyzing whether if they are motivated enough to do it or not.
However, despite it is said that the CAP course does not prepare trainee teachers properly that was absolutely not the same in our case. We have been working a lot through the theoretical classes, we have been writing our main reflections in our weblog through the entire training stage, and we have lived a complete teaching experience. I was wondering at first whether if doing the English CAP or not, as I am studying Journalism and everybody told me to do the social one. But now once we have finished, I am very pleased with my choice. I have learnt lots of new things, and I have had the opportunity to implement these new things in my classes. Along these lines, I have to thank my coach for her help, as well as I have to thank also the CAP teacher for making this experience so profitable. I was lucky also with my class; I had really nice, motivated and participative students.
I was also helping a teacher, Marta Ponti, with her study of the CAP certificate, by sending her a detailed report of all the activities I was doing in my classes. I have to admit that it helped me a lot when teaching and also when writing this final report, because it gave me the chance to analyze my teaching practice day by day, trying to work harder on my weak points.

Let's become a hero lesson plan

After building the scaffolding of my unit, I am going to be as objective and critical with myself as possible when exposing my reflections. Although, in my opinion, the positive appraisal weighs more than the negative one, I will stress the negative in order to learn from it. After all, it is said that the learning process has to be built by learning from our mistakes.
I have finished implementing my unit plan and I can say that my experience has been really positive. More than I ever had expected. I think that students have learned, and I have also learned a lot from them. I am pleased to have been a part of such an important reciprocal process. Despite that this was my first time in school teaching (I was teaching in summer camps, in English schools and giving particular classes), I can say that I have been very comfortable and self-assured while teaching in my class. I have realized as well that teaching in other contexts, like those I have mentioned, have nothing to do with teaching in a secondary school.
As I said before, I think the students have learned, and this is the most important thing. In my humble opinion, they where motivated with the sessions I implemented. Consequently, the student/teacher climate was great. At first I stressed on presenting myself not as a student or as friend, but as a teacher (as we know, sometimes the trainee teachers are seen as a kind of joke in their classes, and they do not attach any importance to it). I have to admit that was one of the things that also worried me a lot because it is known that the appearance of the teacher sometimes plays an important role on defining the respect the pupils have for him/her. And I am not exactly the burly and authoritarian teacher I had respect for when I was a teenager. However, although it may, in a way, determine the relationship between you and your students, it is not the deciding factor. I think they not only see me as their teacher (or I would like to think so), but also as an approachable person, like my coach.
However, and regarding to my positive reflections, I have to thank the particular school I was assigned to. I had all the facilities to make my experience profitable and to make the positive appraisal I can make now. The school is very technological prepared. This allowed for me not to live in two different realities, because all things I have learned in class could have been implemented in my teaching lessons. My coach also helped me a lot by collaborating in all my classes, so the classes I prepared were thought to be taught with two teachers’ support. I also had the advantage of having a class with only a few students, and this allowed me to be closer to them and to do different types of activities than if I had been teaching a big class.
All things I have discussed have contributed to the achievement of my lesson plan’s objectives, but I think that what helped me the most was the classroom observation period. Acting as an observer for a period of time allowed me to create a detailed classroom profile and establish concrete classroom needs that my lesson could satisfy, as well as becoming familiar with students while they became familiar with me before teaching.
My teaching practicum has not all been peaches and cream, however, and as I said at the beginning, I have to reflect on it in order to learn from it. I think there where a few things I have not achieved:
The first one is that I never had enough time to finish all the activities I planned, and it happened again and again. It was like a sort of ‘just in case attitude’, a sort of desperation for having lots of materials prepared just in case students may have been really fast in doing the activities or the computers may not have worked. This last point allows me to talk about technical problems; they were not very frequent, but they still happened.
Another one is that maybe I did not attach enough importance to correcting all the activities. I corrected the activities and I gave my feedback, but sometimes I wonder if I could stress more on that so the students do not repeat the same mistakes. I preferred to work on new activities rather than working again and again on those that were finished.
And lastly, the most important one and still unknown to me, is how the teacher can manage with those students that show no interest for learning. How can the teacher manage if their parents do not buy them the books? How can the teacher manage a student’s conflict in which the parents do not do anything but praising their son/daughter. According to that, I felt myself as totally lacked of resources. I sometimes wondered what I could do to motivate them, and despite the fact that sometimes there are things that escape from teacher hands, I think I have failed on solving that problem. But if I were asked of what I would change if I had to start again, I would not be able to give an answer to that, either.

My lesson plan

Finally, I choose heroes as the main topic of my lesson plan, and a webpage where they could create their own hero as the core of the unit. I thought that letting the pupils create their own hero could be a good way to arouse their interest on description better than if they were describing an imposed one (we are used to seeing lots of activities in textbooks about describing famous people or invented characters, which is no longer working, as it is not attractive to them).
Considering that my pupils have a low level in speaking competences, and also the objectives derived from the curriculum, I chose heroes because it would give me a chance to teach them how to describe people and their abilities, something that will be useful for them to maintain basic conversations in real life. This topic also allowed me to refer to their previous lessons (especially nationalities).
I used different resources to motivate them to learn, like the red cards they had to show me when they had questions, trying always to offer dynamic classes by alternating between different types of activities. The activities were designed to work through different abilities, such as writing, speaking, interacting, listening and reading, although I assigned the most relevance to interacting.
To work with these different activities, I tried to alternate the learning formats, although the most frequent ones were the activities working with the whole group and with small non-competitive groups.
Let’s become a hero! lesson plan also addressed ICT competences, trying to orientate the sessions according to the availability of one computer for each student, or, at least, one computer with a projector in each class. My coach helped me a lot, and most of the activities were planned taking into account that there would be more than one teacher in the class. Otherwise, most of the activities couldn’t have been done.
One of the activities I enjoyed the most (and I think the students enjoyed it a lot as well) was the poster’s creation, which was the final project of the lesson.
Taking the teacher’s poster as an example, they had to create their own poster with the hero they created the first day of the lesson plan. Once they finished, they had to record their hero’s description to post it on a weblog with all students’ creations.
I think that finally I achieved my lesson plan’s objectives, but in my opinion, what helped me the most in order to create a successful lesson plan was the classroom observation period. It allowed me to create a detailed classroom profile and to establish concrete classroom needs that my lesson could satisfy, as well as becoming familiar with students. However, I also have to stress some of the problems I had. The first one is that some pupils did not do their homework even if they knew I was going to grade them. Although they do the same with my tutor, I did not find the appropriate policy to avoid that problem. Regarding this, I have to say that maybe I did not attach enough importance to correcting all the activities. I corrected the activities and I gave my
feedback, but sometimes I wonder if I could stress more on that in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

The mobile phone activity

This is an activity related to the treasure hunt we did the day before. I used the text from one of the activities (the one you can find here http://www.britishcouncil.org/kids-stories-my-dad.htm) to create a dynamic and communicative activity. I made a mobile phone –it was a mobile phone because the text was presented as if it was a mobile’s message- with a box and a coloured card, and I put inside all the sentences from the text. I divided them in three groups –three/four people in each- and I told them each group had to manage to build up the complete text. So I held the mobile phone with my hands, and, group by group, they had to pick up one sentence. Only when they had discovered the meaning of the sentence –by asking me or my coach- they could pick up the next one, and then the next… and so on. Thus it was like a competition between the different groups to get all the sentences (the had the complete text projected). But there was a problem! If they picked up a paper with a strange and red coloured message like:

OH! I’M SORRY, YOUR MUM IS CALLING! Then they had to give all the sentences back and start again.

I think they really enjoyed the activity and, of course, I also enjoyed it a lot when I realized they were having a great time with my activity!

Using treasure hunts

This is the treasure hunt I prepared for my students the week before Christmas. It is related to families again. I think they enjoyed it a lot, but they hadn’t got enough time to finish it. I used one of the activities I included in my treasure hunt (you can find the activity here: http://www.britishcouncil.org/kids-stories-my-dad.htm) to prepare the activity of the following day.

Link to the treasure hunt:
http://poster.4teachers.org/worksheet/view.php?id=128114

Let’s become a journalist!

Before Christmas I went to a fourth of ESO class where the students were working on a Project called “el País de los Estudiantes”. As I am studying to be journalist, my coach asked me to talk with them about the profession in general. Although I am a bit pessimistic about the practical uses of my degree, I tried to give them the most neutral vision I could (of course I am not the appropriate person to tell them what to do, and I don’t want to influence them). Thus I explained the students that journalism is a nice profession, but also a discredited one. I told them to think it twice, not only about choosing journalism, but about choosing a degree in general. I told them to think not only of the degree and the syllabus, but also of the good or bad prospects of the future job. I really enjoyed a lot that class! They asked me lots of questions because they were a little bit confused about the steps they had to follow before going to the university. I felt for a while I was an important person!

Joking apart, I think that somehow my words helped them.