I completed two more teaching hours on June 17th. I decided to teach reading strategies this week because I was dissatisfied with how the vocabulary lesson went last week. This would give me another chance to observe how my sponsor teacher structures and presents vocabulary lessons to help me in future classes.

Reflecting on the courses

I think that the teaching that I did for the reading course went fairly well this week. I connected the topic for this week to previous lessons where we covered the concepts of main ideas and supporting details. After that, I provided students with information about facts and opinions and examples of each. Students were asked to explain why statements were either facts or opinions. They were also introduced to signal words and target language that are used to express opinions and to create paragraphs based on their opinions about statements that I presented. These activities took longer than expected and we were unable to finish the opinion group activity due to time constraints.

It was unclear at the end of the lesson whether the students understood the information that I presented. Even after telling students that they should stop me or ask me to repeat things if something is unclear or if I speak too fast, I did not receive any feedback from students. My sponsor teacher says that this is a cultural thing for students from Asian countries. They will refrain from asking teachers questions during class because they are afraid of losing face. Instead, many ask classmates sitting near them to explain things or ask the teacher after class to explain something that they did not understand. This is frustrating for me because I don't know how to modify my teaching if I don't hear from the students. After talking about this issue with my sponsor teacher, she recommended that I look at the students' body language. She said that a few of the most motivated and studious students always sit up at the front and that they will ask each other to explain things if there is something that they don't understand. As such, if I see them talking to each other a lot then it is probably because I wasn't clear about something and that it is safe to assume that other students might be confused too.

If I were to teach the lesson again, I would provide more visuals to help engage the students. I strongly prefer using PowerPoint presentations to writing on the whiteboard since the key points are presented to students and I have time to explain them and provide examples instead of wasting time writing on the whiteboard. I also think I would split up the lesson plan into two separate lessons. The first lesson would introduce the materials that I presented this week and use one or two activities from the resource that I used this week. I think that the activity where students read a short article and categorize statements in a chart as either facts or opinions would work well for the class. The second lesson would focus more on practicing this reading strategy. Students could complete a worksheet where they distinguish between facts and opinions and do the activity from the lesson plan where they develop opinions with a small group. I feel like there was a lot of information presented in this lesson and that there was a lack of opportunities for students to practice and apply what they learned.

I think that the teaching I did for the cultural conversational class also went reasonably well. I presented the students with a starting point for identifying cultural differences and comparing what and how information might differ in educational institutions in Canada versus their home countries. Some students seemed interested in these differences and provided me with a background on their own educational experience and/or observations. This part of the lesson used a lot of new terms, which may have been overwhelming or confusing for some students. If I were to teach this lesson again, I would focus less on this part of the lesson because many students are also taking the reading course. As such, I may be using too many new words and it is unrealistic to expect students to retain all of the new language that they are being presented with. In addition, the students will not be tested on the terms in the cultural conversational class and it may be more practical to use the time to encourage students to practice their listening and speaking skills.

After presenting the students with the context for this lesson, I introduced the concept of learning styles to the students. I provided them with a booklet that had all of the questions that I included in the questionnaire and a space where they could tally their scores to determine their learning styles. Each question has four options--one option for each of the four learning styles used in the VARK questionnaire. Students were asked to select one or two options for each question or to leave it blank.

I was very surprised at the end of the quiz when none of the students ended up being a predominately visual (graphic) learner, especially since the addition of visual materials seemed to hold the students' attention better than having to rely on their listening skills for most of the class. As such, I think that there may have been an issue in how this learning style was presented in the questions. Many of the questions directly from the VARK questionnaire involved graphic organizers and charts, which may have not been the best way to describe this learning style. Perhaps better examples or more illustrations in the presentation would have been able to showcase this learning style and students who learn this way could have recognized themselves better in options. However, I did learn that many students were auditory or kinesthetic learners. This is helpful for me as a teacher because I know from this information that the students will benefit most from group activities where they can practice using English (which is what this class is about!) and from examples that connect to real life situations and allow them to participate directly rather than passively following a lecture. Overall, I think that the students benefited from this lesson and walked away with more ideas about how they can prepare for tests using their learning styles.

If I were to teach the lesson again, I would provide more illustrations in the PowerPoint made for the questionnaire since the lack of consistency may have attributed to misunderstandings about the options for some questions. I would also have done more research about visual learning styles so that the options could illustrate situations in a clearer way and that provided more variety than the typical question where the answer involved using charts and graphs. I think this option is too technical and focuses too much on applying the skill inside of the classroom whereas other options apply to situations outside of the classroom and have much more realistic options.