Planning Session to Teach Spanish to a Group of Adult Learners - Assignment Example

?Planning My Session to Teach Spanish to a Group of Adult Learners Insert Insert Number Insert CLTA Module Insert Question: You have just been offered a contract to teach Spanish to a group of adult learners on a 10-week part-time course for beginners, 2 hours per week. What considerations will you have to bear in mind when planning your sessions? Introduction A teaching session should be designed in a way that it enhances achievement of learning goals and acquisition of knowledge and skills to the students. Having been contracted to teach a class of beginner’s in 10-weeks, where a session takes 2 hours per week, planning my sessions becomes essential. This paper contains my comprehensive plan regarding my Spanish teaching sessions to a group of adult learners. In planning my session, I put in mind my students’ interest as beginner Spanish learners and the knowledge and skills they want to develop. My roles and responsibilities My responsibilities as a language teacher is to ensure that the activities used in the learning process are tailored towards achievement of the learning objectives. These responsibilities are related to the learning that range from advising my students on how to maximize effects of their learning styles to actual teaching of language concepts in class. It is also my responsibility to assess the level of understanding my students have developed through learning and safeguarding their data and information. I take the role of an educator; teaching my students language concepts. The other role is that of an education advisor, advising them on how to improve their learning, and that of an evaluator, evaluating and assessing the level of knowledge they have developed during a learning session. However, it is not my responsibility to counsel student on their social and financial problems even though the issues might affect their learning process since the institution has employed specialist for those responsibilities. For example, students’ affair personnel counsel students on various non-academic issues affecting their academic life and accounting personnel deal with financial issues affecting our students. Therefore, when I spot a student who needs counseling in either issue, I normally refer them to the right personnel where they can get assistance. The context of the lessons The lessons will be taking place in the UK, which is a non-Spanish speaking nation. These will actually pose some challenges to the students, one of them being lack of Spanish speaking community to talk to outside classroom. Another challenge is that my students do not have any foundation in the Spanish language. This might make it difficult for them to understand difficult Spanish language concepts. I have critically looked at this issue and after evaluating some of the solution I can employ, I have to involve many sessions in which they practice their understanding of the language. This is because I understood that if I want my students to understand Spanish more easily despite their country of origin and the fact that they are in the UK, language practice will be essential. Under the UK laws, we have various legislations that are relevant to the context of teaching language. These are the equal opportunities, health, and safety at work, data protection, and CRB checks when you are working with vulnerable adults. In my teaching sessions, I will always be making sure that all my students have equal opportunities to participate in the learning session without any kind of discrimination. None of my students will be discriminated in my lesson regardless of age, gender, and race, country of origin or even learning capabilities. To ensure safety and health at work, I will design codes of conduct to be observed by all the parties involved in the learning sessions including the teacher. These codes will be relating to how the parties are supposed to behave during a learning session and how they should treat each other and each other’s opinions during a learning session. In addition, I will be making sure that all the data and information I will be collecting on a student will be private and confidential to only the student involved and I. In addition, this data will only be used for academic purposes to improve the learning of the student involved. Although currently I am not working with vulnerable adult, if in any case they emerge I will ensure that I frequently conduct a CRB check to make sure they are not disadvantaged during my teaching sessions. The type of the course I will be administering to my students is a beginners’ course for the general Spanish language. This course is critical for any individual who want to learn Spanish as a foreign language. It acts as a door opener to other more advanced courses in this language and thus it should be well understood for easy understanding of the other advanced courses in the Spanish language. The course aims to teach basics and familiar expressions used in the day-to-day activities of the Spanish language. It also aims to help the students involved to be able to introduce themselves and to ask questions on personal details of other Spanish-speaking people hence enhancing interaction. The course will be taught two hours per week in ten weeks. The teaching time will be 5 pm to 7 pm. The timetable has been designed in this manner in order to avoid interrupting with the daily schedules of both students and the teaching staffs. All the classes will be held in room 9 in our institution. Arrangements have been made to ensure that this room will always be available to ensure smooth running of the learning activities. The room has a large capacity and thus we felt that it is the most ideal because of the large number of students we expect. To teach Spanish effectively to beginner students we actually require many resources. We have put in place almost all these resources to ensure that teaching and learning will not be interrupted. We have selected a room big enough to hold the number of students we expect. We have constructed a curriculum for the course and we have selected a course book to be used in teaching. We have also selected newsletters that can be used in teaching both in written form and in audio form. We have also designed an attendance register to monitor the attendance of the students and an assessment recording mechanism. The students themselves The students I am expected to teaching have different national origins and cultural backgrounds. They all have one similarity; they have learned English language to at least high school level in different learning institutions. However, none of them has learnt Spanish language. This makes all of them to start at the same level in language learning and thus it will be appropriate to apply the same language teaching approach to all of them. These students have different interests and reasons for learning the Spanish language. Some of them are learning the language for commercial purposes i.e. to be able to undertake business in areas where Spanish is the mostly spoken language. Others are learning the language for social purposes, so that they can be able to interact with Spanish speaking people while others are learning it for educations purposes. Like the interests of these students, their motivation also varies from one student to the other. Some especially those who are learning it for business purposes are more motivated as compared to others. Moreover, those within a certain age bracket are more motivated than others. The youngest of the students seems to have more motivation and drive to learn the language as compared to the older ones. To avoid negative effects caused by different levels of motivation, my teaching sessions will encourage equal participation of the students. Adult learners have several characteristics that distinguish them from children learners. Unlike childhood, adulthood is always associated with several major responsibilities whether family or personal (Wlodkowski 32). Therefore, one characteristic of adult learners is that they have several major responsibilities where some of them might be conflicting with their learning needs. Another characteristic they share almost all of them is that they have voluntarily chosen to learn because of various factors in their live and hence they are self-driven. Another characteristic is that at each particular level of learning you can get individuals with a lot of diversity. This diversity can be in terms of age, experience, language background, tradition, gender, personality, employment, and social economic status (Fasokun, Katahoire and Oduaran 22). These characteristics pose challenges to adult learners that are very different from those encountered by children learners. The lessons and course content We will start our course with designing some class rules in which every party involved in the classroom activities will be required to observe. Since I will be dealing with adults, it is not logical to impose rules on them. To avoid this I will use a few minutes in my first lesson to discuss with them the possible rules to be followed during classwork and repercussions of breaking those rules. In formulating these rules, I will explain to them what we need to achieve when using the rules. We will need to achieve a quiet learning environment that is free of disturbances. Some of the rules we will include in our ground rules are punctuality, switching of mobile phone during classes, not laughing at other people’s mistakes and any other relevant rule they might come up with during the rules formulation session. Teaching and learning approach Our approach to teaching and learning will be student-centered. A major advantage of this approach it that it favours students learning more than any other approach. Using this approach, we will be consulting the students about what they need to learn during the program and combine their views with the content of the curriculum to enhance learning. This approach will also ensure that the students are involved in various aspects of learning to enhance their understanding. A major disadvantage of this approach is that it is time consuming and if we are not cautious, we might fail to cover the required material within the allocated time. However, we will be undertaking proper time management to avoid this disadvantage. It is also because of the disadvantage that we always insists on punctuality to ensure that time is maximally utilized. Our teaching and learning approach is aimed to enhance development of core and functional skills relating to the Spanish language. Some of this skills are literacy, language numeracy and information technology. To enhance Spanish language literacy among our students I will be trying as much as possible to foster students’ basic life skills. These could also enhance the other core and functional skills like numeracy and information technology. I do not expect to have a student with a large gap in term of basic life skills but if I encounter one, I will refer her to more specialist assistance. I will be evaluating the literacy level using the much a student can understand and use the concepts of the Spanish language I have taught them. I will be evaluating the language skills using the fluency in which they speak the Spanish concepts I have taught them and how comprehensively they understand those concepts when spoken to. For the numeracy skills, I will be evaluating it by checking whether they can be able to do simple arithmetic explained in Spanish. For the information technology skills, I will be evaluating their development by requiring them to send me emails written in Spanish to explain a certain simple thing. Student assessment In assessing my students, I will be using both summative assessment and formative assessment. I will be using summative assessments mainly to check the understanding of the concepts I had taught my students. For the formative assessment, I will be relying on it mainly when I want to check what needs to be improved either by the students or by me as the teacher. These assessments will be used in different contexts so that they can promote learning among the students. The formative assessments will be used at the beginning or during the learning session to yield information that can assist in improving the sessions. The summative assessments will be used at the end of the learning sessions to measure the level of understanding the students have managed to attain during a learning session. Apart from these two assessments, I will also undertake a diagnostic test that will help me to understand the language learning skills of my students at the beginning of the course. This will help me in shaping my teaching to suite their specific needs. The students will be given feedback on all the assessment whether formative, summative, or diagnostic. I will be using both the formal and informal methods of giving feedback in an alternating way depending on what the feedback aims to achieve. For the summative assessments, I will be relying mostly on formal methods of giving feedback like giving assessment results and grading of the results. However, for the diagnostic and formative assessment I will mainly be using informal method to give feedback to the students like explaining to them what they got right and what they got wrong without grading them. My feedback will not be based only on criticism but on the general progress of the students including what they are doing well. Record keeping We will be undertaking various records keeping throughout the course session. One of the major records we will be keeping is the attendance records and the assessment records. Apart from teaching brilliantly, I always feel that it is very important to keep other records especially attendance records. This is because for a student to learn all the concepts taught in a course; he should make sure that he attends all the learning sessions. This record also plays a very great part in interpreting formative assessment results. This is because a student might be having a problem with a certain concept because he failed to attend the session in which that concept was taught. This helps in avoiding the conclusion that he is having a problem because of his personal weakness. It is also very important to keep records of students in relation to assessment. This is because this record can help the teacher to trace any kind of improvement especially when he has introduced a new teaching technique. This improvement can be compared with previous levels of performance of students to assist in evaluating that new teaching technique. These records can also help students in comparing their past performance with a current performance and therefore know where and when they need to improve their learning. Conclusion In my Spanish teaching sessions to a group of adult learners, all responsibilities tailored towards improving learning and increasing knowledge in my students will be mine as the teacher. However, I will refer those other responsibilities like the student counseling and student financial problems to the right personnel in the institutions. My students have different learning background however, they all have one similarity that they have learned English up-to high school level and they all have very little or no knowledge about Spanish. All of them are adult learners and hence they have characteristics different from that of children learners and thus they require a unique teaching and learning approach. In my teaching, I will always be applying a teaching and learning approach that encourages students’ participation to enhance their learning. I will be evaluating this approach every now and them to determine its effectiveness. Moreover, to ensure achievement of learning objectives I will be administering various assessments like diagnostic assessments, formative assessments and summative assessment as often as possible. I will also be keeping records both on the students’ attendance to learning sessions and on those of the students’ performance data. I therefore expect these learning sessions that I have planned to be very successful in achieving the course objective. Reference Fasokun, Thomas, O., Katahoire, Ann, and Oduaran, Akpovire, B. The Psychology of Adult Learning in Africa. Johannesburg: Pearson, 2005. Print. Wlodkowski, Raymond, J. Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn: A Comprehensive Guide for Teaching All Adults. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Print. Read More