I completed the final two teaching hours on June 26th. I will reflect on both of the classes below.

I think that the teaching that I did for the reading course went very well. I fit the content for the review class into the Jeopardy game. Most of the categories that I set up were focused on reviewing vocabulary that the students have covered since their mid-term exam. One category had them use some vocabulary words in a sentence. Another had them identify other forms of vocabulary words. The final category centered around using the reading strategies that they learned in the course. I am glad that my sponsor teacher gave this activity as a suggestion because the students seemed to really enjoy it. It was similar to the Kahoot! activity because they could work with their group members to compete against other groups. My sponsor teacher helped me to think of categories to use in the game and I really appreciate her assistance with the lessons that I put together for this week.

There is one change that I would make to the lesson if I were to teach it again. I would make sure that my rules were consistent. The members of a few of the groups sat very close together and it was difficult to tell who was in each group. As a result, I accidentally asked the same person to choose a character/team name for another group. I also had trouble evaluating some of the responses to decide whether their responses were satisfactory. I had to ask my sponsor teacher for input in these situations. Sometimes she suggested to give partial marks to groups for their answers or suggested that I let other groups attempt to steal points from each other. These decisions were not consistent and I worry that some students think I favoured some groups over another.

Another thing that I worried about was that my instructions may not have been clear and could have caused confusion. In those situations, I tried to give students hints at what information they might be missing. For example, one of my questions provided a list of words to students and they were supposed to infer what the subject was. There were names of places (Cairo and Giza) and landscapes (Nile river and desert), in addition to landmarks and adjectives describing the topic. The group was quick to identify Egypt as part of the topic but were confused when I wanted a more specific answer. Rather than moving on to another group to see if they could provide a more specific answer, I pointed out other words like cameras and souvenirs to help them. I asked the group why someone would need them and what that says about the topic. The group eventually identified the topic as travelling (or tourism) in Egypt. I don't think that this was the most fair strategy to use in the activity, but I felt like the exercise was helpful for other groups too.

I don't think that the teaching I did for the cultural conversational class went as well as the reading class. I made the mistake of dividing the class up into groups with multiple students from a shared home country to discuss what we covered in the course and the similarities and differences between Canada and their home country. Students did not have much to teach each other since they had a lot of shared experiences. As a result, some of the groups just used the time to chat with each other about other topics. My practicum supervisor also mentioned that I took too much time reviewing past lessons and that the time could have been used better for a different activity. This is especially true since the students did not have to prepare for a test or final exam in this class.

I also had problems with a modified version of the game Taboo. I think that I needed to be more specific with my instructions because some students used words that they were not supposed to use (maybe they thought they were hints) and multiple group members tried to get the guesser to say the target word at the same time. There was a lot of confusion about this activity and I would spend more time modelling the activity if I were to use it in the future. I think that these mistakes were made because I don't have much teaching experience. Other teachers who have been teaching for a while know what works and does not work with students and so I will have a better idea of the type of instruction that I need to provide for my students after I gain more experience in the field.