Reflective Account of Peer Teaching - Scholarship Essay Example

Reflection This paper offers my reflection on the teaching experience using two different versions of lesson plan with my peer. The reflection is about the experience of vocabulary teaching to the upper intermediate English language learners that I shared with my partner. We selected the task-based method to teach vocabulary. It was a student-centered approach that required the students to work in groups and practice together. Version 1 had three stages; pre-task, the cycle, and post-task and it was conducted by my partner. In the pre-task, she introduced a lesson to the students and asked them a set of questions drawing upon vocabulary. To achieve this, she used a cover book’s picture in the text. The objective of this exercise was to build students’ vocabulary. In the cycle stage of Version 1, my partner provided the students with an opportunity to exhibit their knowledge of the second language. My partner monitored the students as they answered the questions included in the task in front of each other. The lesson plan primarily included exercises that required students to form questions from the answers provided. The idea was to induce reverse thinking skills in the students. While designing Version 1 of the lesson plan, we thought that while reverse-thinking, students would come across a whole range of words to express their questions, but contrary to our expectations, students came up with questions that were relatively simpler and did not involve many difficult words. Such an activity was clearly not best-suited to build vocabulary. Such exercises in which the students have to develop questions from answers are good for the development of correct grammar sense in them, but there is not much vocabulary building involved. My partner made a technical mistake that she printed different text and exercises on each paper and distributed them to all the students individually so that all students had different exercises and text. However, she made groups of two students each to do the exercises which was basically pointless as each student had different exercise and text. The tutor suggested my partner to assign different exercises to different groups. The primary exercise in the post-task stage was for the students to hear the native speakers form the questions from the answers in the same way. This provided the students with an opportunity to compare their questions with those of the native speakers. I conducted Version 2 of the lesson plan. In the pre-teach stage, I introduced the lesson to the students. I taught them a whole range of new words drawing upon the knowledge they already had. For example, the students knew the word ‘beauty’; I taught them how adding suffixes to it makes it an adjective i.e. ‘beautiful’. Similarly, I taught them how to convert a verb into a noun e.g. ‘compare’ to ‘comparison’. It was interesting to hear the students come up with guesses for the words they did not know before. For example, one student developed the word ‘neglegation’ from ‘neglect’. I taught the students that the correct word is ‘negligence’ and not ‘neglegation’. This is an effective way of inscribing new words into the students’ vocabulary because they remember the wrong word they guessed, and along with it, the correct word they were taught! To develop their vocabulary further, I taught the students synonyms for the words they knew. For example, I taught them that ‘ignore’ is another word for ‘neglect’. I also taught the students difference between words that are often used interchangeably e.g. ‘novel’ and ‘fiction’; ‘leadership’ and ‘management’. The tutor suggested me to form groups of two classmates each and assign them different exercises which primarily centered around choosing the right word in meaning from a list of options for the given word. I clearly gave instructions to the students prior to the start of exercises to optimize their understanding and clarity of vision (kean.edu, n.d.). Another task required the groups to match words to their correct suffixes. This was followed by yet another task of matching the newly formed words after adding suffixes to the given words, with their meanings. My classmates and tutors identified this weakness in my approach and I also felt it myself; I should have asked the groups to look out for the words with the same meanings as those of the given words in the text rather than straight-forwardly telling them the words. Alternately, I should have numbered the text lines and located the words to the students using line numbers so that they could think of their meanings. The lesson plan helped me structure and organize the lectures in a way that helped me manage my time well. Even before starting with the lecture, I knew how much time I had to give to each stage of teaching i.e. pre-teach stage, while teach stage, and the post-teach stage. This helped me make optimal use of my limited time in the class so that I could arrange enough time to address the individual and collective queries of the students. Research has shown correlation between teacher planning and student learning (Bilash, 2011). A lesson plan gives a direction to the lecture in that it not only dictates a teacher what activities are to be performed, but also makes it very clear to the students what they are expected to do in each stage of teaching. A lesson plan delineates the interaction pattern in each stage of teaching. Awareness of the interaction pattern from the start helps a teacher approach the students in the right way to optimize their overall experience of learning and being in the classroom. Likewise, the importance of mentioning the teaching tools and aids in the different stages of teaching in a lesson plan cannot be overemphasized. This teaching experience helped arouse my creativity with respect to designing lesson plans. For example, a very important way to build students’ confidence to speak second language even when they are not very competent in it is to engage them in interesting discussions. Once I gave my students an open-ended sentence and asked them to complete it. The sentence I gave them was, “The first thing foreigners do in the US is…..” and asked each student to make two different sentences completing what I gave them. Students came up with very interesting ideas of what people do when they first come to the US; some said, “go shopping”, others wrote, “book an apartment”. After all students were done with this activity, I asked the students to explain what caused them to come up with those ideas. While explaining, many students overcame that initial hesitation people feel while speaking English as second-language speakers. This activity not only made the students confident, it improved their creativity, and provided them with an opportunity to be notified of the mistakes in their grammar and speech after they were done speaking in a very encouraging and friendly environment. The rationale behind the original version, henceforth referred to as Version 1, of lesson plan turned out to be to develop critical thinking skills in the students, though its objective was to teach them vocabulary, which stated; “Focus on vocabulary learning in order to draw some students’ attention to the main passage; improving some students speaking skill through the use of key vocabulary and talking about the main topic”. Firstly, the objective should have been straight-forward and precise. Version 1’s objective was unnecessarily long and wordy and also contained unrequired words like ‘some’. I revised the objective so that Version 2’s objective was, “To increase students’ vocabulary to make their speech more expressive”. Secondly, my partner used a cover book’s picture for this. However, I was not content with the idea because there could be more exciting and educative ways of building vocabulary. Nevertheless, I share the blame with my partner on this because we had planned the Version 1 together. The key to designing a lesson plan is to know what skills have to be inculcated in the students and what is the most interesting way to achieve this with the students. Learning from the mistakes of my partner and considering the comments and suggestions of the tutor, I was able to customize the lesson plan in Version 2 so as to deliver the objective of vocabulary building in the students through it. I used the excerpts from the different parts of the novel Blind Assassin to teach the students new words. An added benefit of using this novel for second language teaching is that it provides students with an insight into how their newly learned words are used in everyday speech by the native speakers. The peer planning and micro teaching process is a great way of improving teaching skills in general and scheduling and group skills in particular. It can be generally concluded that lesson planning is the most important part of the whole micro teaching process as everything ensues from the original lesson plan. It is critically important for the teachers to ensure that the tools and aids used in teaching, duration of the different stages of teaching, and the outcomes thus retrieved adhere to the original objective set in the lesson plan. According to Milkova (2014), a successful lesson plan integrates three main elements i.e. student learning objectives, activities, and strategies employed by the teacher to check student understanding. It is advisable for the teachers to take some time to rehearse the exercises and activities they have contemplated for the students before coming to the class so that they can ensure that they have chosen correct exercises to address their lesson plan’s objective. Had my partner rehearsed the activity before implementing Version 1, the activity would have proven effective in developing students’ vocabulary. With regard to lesson execution, it can be generally concluded that the most difficult job for a teacher is to stick to the lesson plan. The different stages of teaching actually take longer to complete than anticipated in the lesson plan, so it is advisable for the teachers to decide the stages’ durations keeping some cushion for unanticipated activities in them. Teaching in the presence of my partner and tutor was very beneficial. Both my partner and I received constructive criticism from the tutor which helped us improve our lesson planning and executing skills. Another very useful aspect of this process was the confidence it developed in both my partner and I. Previously, I felt shy teaching in front of my peers. Now I have developed confidence to teach while being observed by my peers. I have sensed the same rise of confidence in my partner too. The only thing that was not useful about this process was the activity my partner selected in Version 1, though even that activity served to teach the students how to reverse-think, so it would be unjust to totally rule it out. References: Bilash, O 2011, Lesson Planning in the Language Classroom, [Online] Available at http://www.educ.ualberta.ca/staff/olenka.bilash/best%20of%20bilash/lessonplanning.html [accessed: 24 December 2014]. Kean.edu n.d., Effective lesson planning, delivery techniques and classroom management suggestions, [Online] Available at http://www.kean.edu/~tpc/Classroom%20Management/EFFECTIVE%20LESSON%20PLANNING%20&%20Classroom%20Mgmt.htm [accessed: 24 December 2014]. Milkova, S 2014, Strategies for Effective Lesson Planning, Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, [Online] Available at http://www.crlt.umich.edu/gsis/p2_5 [accessed: 24 December 2014]. Read More