I completed two more teaching hours on June 10th. Just like the classes that I taught last week, my sponsor teacher and I decided that I should teach the first hour of each class and that she would teach the second hour. Since I taught the reading lesson last week, we decided that I should teach the vocabulary for the reading class so that I could practice teaching in a different context. The teaching context for the culture conversational class was the same and focused on listening to and writing dialogues.

Reflecting on the courses

I don't think that the teaching I did for the reading course went well this week. After my first teaching class last week, I chose to prepare materials for teaching the vocabulary in one of this week's units. This lesson plan was created under the assumption that there would be no homework assigned to students since the test that they had was expected to take the whole class. I did not know until I began teaching my lesson that the students had gone over the vocabulary briefly on Friday, following the test. I had planned to introduce the new words to the students but they were already somewhat familiar with them. I think that this situation occurred as a result of poor communication between myself and my sponsor teacher. As a result of this misunderstanding, the lesson plan and teaching materials that I had prepared were repetitive and the students were not engaged in the lesson. This was not helped by my inability to teach some of the activities I had included in the lesson plan because I had forgotten to complete the interactive quiz. In the future, I will try to avoid this kind of situation by making sure to check in with her after lessons that I have not attended and by preparing my lesson plans in advance.

I found it very difficult to teach the lesson since I did not have any alternative our backup materials prepared. I was not sure how to use the activities in the book in my lesson or how to integrate them into new activities on the spot. I did not want to use some of my materials, which expanded on the definitions in the textbook. This was an attempt to clarify the differences between similar words as a way for preparing for the interactive quiz (which was not finished.) I had started to teach the materials but the students seemed confused and disengaged. I thought that continuing with that aspect of the lesson would overwhelm the students with too much information at once. My mind went blank and my anxiety settled in. My sponsor teacher gave the students a short break and I sought her opinion on what I could do. She suggested that I do the sections of the chapter called "Words in Discussion" and "Words in Writing." Since the class focuses on reading, she said that having students write their responses to these questions was unnecessary and that having the students discuss the answers to these questions in small groups would be sufficient.

I think that explaining the differences between similar vocabulary words (e.g. pity and sympathy) was helpful for some students. However, if I were to teach the lesson again, I would not put as much emphasis on definitions. I think that I focused too much on definitions in my lesson and since I did not do the interactive quiz, the students had no means of applying what was taught or opportunities to practice trying to identify words and definitions. I would also benefit from creating backup activities for situations like this one where some activities ended up not working or were not appropriate for the context. Another change that I could make would be to use the interactive quiz as a means of reviewing vocabulary before a test. In addition, my sponsor teacher told me that I should use more visual materials since most of the students are still developing their listening skills and that too much lecturing can frustrate students who are visual and/or tactile learners. She suggested that I use the whiteboard more or incorporate a PowerPoint presentation and/or fill-in worksheet (that corresponds with the lecture) in my lesson plan. She also stressed that there is nothing wrong with teaching from the textbook and only making minor changes to the activities when including them in a lesson plan. I do not have much experience adapting textbook materials, so I hope that this will be something that becomes easier as I progress in my career.

I think that the teaching I did for the cultural conversational class went reasonably well. I presented the students with the social context of eating and/or ordering at restaurants and examples of conversations that can occur between customers and restaurant staff. There was a lot of information to write on the whiteboard and going over that information took a long time. Based on previous feedback from my sponsor teacher, I tried to use the whiteboard more because most students (including myself) have trouble listening to speech for a long time and benefit from having written material that they can refer to when trying to follow along with the lesson. I am not sure how well the students heard me because I had to face the whiteboard a lot. One benefit was that students were introduced to reading and creating dialogue texts from my previous lesson, so there was less confusion this time around. However, getting students to offer information was difficult and I did not receive any requests to speak louder, more slowly, or to explain materials in a different way. This was confusing for me and I have no way of determining how much the students understood what I was saying and whether they found my delivery helpful or not.

If I were to teach the lesson again, I would not rely as heavily on dialogues. I think that I focused too much on teaching the students various phrases and providing them with skills for situations when they would be eating and/or ordering at a restaurant. While this is practical, doing dialogues for every cultural conversational class can get repetitive. If students do not learn well through discussion or organizing and writing materials, they can become bored and it is difficult to maintain levels of student engagement afterwards. I think I would benefit from adding visuals (other than writing on the whiteboard) and using different types of activities in my lessons. Rather than having students create dialogues, I could do activities like having students roleplay pre-prepared conversations or incorporate games into the lesson, assuming that I would not be using time that could be better used to prepare students for tests and that there are no tests scheduled soon.