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.