My experience in teaching
practicum II.
Before to start with the teaching practicum with teenagers my thoughts
were totally different from what they are now. At the beginning I thought that
it was going to be a difficult challenge to achieve, because I never before had
the opportunity to teach English classes to teenagers; but in this practicum I
did have, and it was one of the best experiences that I have had in my teaching
process.
During this practicum I was assigned to work with two different groups
of students. The first five weeks I worked with a small group of teenagers,
they were only fourteen students between the ages of 15 and 16 years old. Then I
worked with a bigger group. They were 26 students between 14, 15 and 16 years old.
The groups were both totally different because in one group I could notice that
the students were very quiet, they worked most of the time but sometimes they
were very shy. One of the reasons I think they were very shy was because they
were afraid of making mistakes and they were very sensitive about what other
classmates thought or said about them. I knew that some teenagers are very
sensitive about what other people think about them,because this was one of the characteristics
that I studied during the first weeks of the course. That is why in my lessons I
tried to use activities and techniques that engaged students to participate;
also I tried to keep their self-esteem high by doing activities in groups
because I knew in that way they were able to participate and take more risk.
Otherwise, the second group was very different because the teenagers
liked to talk a lot, they were not shy, in a way they were very confident, but
sometimes they were easily distracted that their attention span was shorted.
For that reason, I always tried to look for interesting activities for them,
because in that way they were going to be busy doing something fun or interesting.
Nonetheless, that was not difficult for me because I had a lot of fun with
them, I practiced and the most important thing I improved a lot during the five
times that I was asked to teach a class, of course there were times in which I
was assigned to teach only two or three stages of the lesson, and sometimes I was
given with the opportunity to teach a complete lesson plan of one hour. This was
really meaningful for me because I had the opportunity to work with real
students even though, only were 9 weeks that I worked with them I learned many
things because the feedback and advice that my mentor teacher gave me were really useful for me and I am
so thankful because she was a good mentor and model for me. In addition to this,
the students I was working with were kind and respectful with me; they looked
at me as a real teacher not as a student who was only there to practice.
Also, in my participations I felt so proud of myself because every
time I taught a class my mentor teacher gave me some advice and feedback to
improve for the next time and I took that into consideration that before to
teach a class I had in mind all that she said to me and when I finished my
lessons I was happy to see that the goal was achieved because I was improving every
time.
In general the experience was really good because we learned many
things but sadly there are good and bad aspects about this. One of the good
aspects about this experience was the place, because we were in the university
and we were practicing with real students, also we had a mentor teacher that
was there to guide us and give us some advice to improve. The bad aspects were
the day and the schedule because for me was a little bit difficult to stay at
the university so late because of the transportation and the time of departure.
