Reflective Summary

 

Reflective Summary 

 

    One of the continuing thoughts I always trusted that lingered throughout my internship was that I myself is learning even though my role is the teacher inside the classroom. Throughout my teaching practicum there were lots of strengths, lessons and experience that I added myself as a student teacher. By successfully engaging in the internship program, I believe I got a valuable chance to convert the theoretical knowledge I have been grasping as a TESL undergraduate of University of Kelaniya into practice. Through the challenges faced and finding my own classroom management remedies going hand in hand with the theoretical knowledge, I now find myself a step-ahead student teacher who is much more confident and experienced to lead my career as an ESL teacher.

    I believe that selecting Colombo South International College, Kalubowila for my teaching practicum is one of the greatest decisions that I have made since the community along with the extremely supportive mentors and enthusiastic set of students helped to create a remarkable experience for me. The school itself is having a great reputation being one of the iconic schools in Colombo district that caters English medium education. I was allocated to teach grade 8,9,10, and 11 (national syllabus) where they even include textbooks from outside of the government curriculum to meet the expected English language proficiency of the students. I was fortunate enough to experience teaching in multicultural classroom settings where there are students from different ethnicities who have their own different first languages. Staff and the administration of the school was very welcoming from the very first day up until the date of completion of my internship there. The teacher-in-charge, MR Mazahir is a very exemplary character that a student teacher like me can lean a lot from. Being a much unbiased personality he guided me well enough to become the best version of the teacher that I aspire to be. 

    One of the cleverest moves that I took before commencing my teaching practicum was conducting classroom observations where the usual teachers were teaching in the classroom that were assigned for me to teach afterwards. Through that could understand the classroom setting and the classroom management techniques that the class is catered with. Getting an idea about how the students and the teachers engage in the classrooms was helpful for me to decide the perfect mixture of the classroom management tools that I needed to exploit in the classrooms. I have observed several English language teachers who had their own identical ways of managing the classroom environment in order to meet their expected teaching goals. Their efforts were more or less effective according to my knowledge.

    As the strengths that I had, the well-planed and detailed lesson plans, well-prepared teaching materials and the creativity that I explored while making fun and unique activities can be noted.one of the realizations that I came across was that the people in general differ from each other so are our students. They have their own capacities and the ways they find comfortable and interesting to follow in their learning process. Thus, as teachers it is our utmost responsibility to understand the needs, dislikes and likes of the students and guide them into the expected proficiency of the target language in a way that they can enjoy learning. In my teaching practicum I have used very unique approaches to teach expected language content for example I usually use certain attention grabbers especially in the beginning of the class that goes hand in hand with a useful list of vocabulary they need to know regarding the planned lesson. With these attention grabbers not only the lower grade students such as grade 8 and 9 but also the upper grades such as grade 10 and 11 is very willingly learn language content. And also to teach certain grammar content I most of the times utilized gamification and also some imaginary situations that they can fantasize and learn the significant use of the specific grammar content. For example I hypothetically gives them a magical chewing-gum where they follow my instructions while opening the cover of the chewing-gum and starts hypothetically chewing them. And the students are told that until they are chewing the chewing gum they gets a chance to go back in time or to go their future. Then they are supposed to come up with one thing that they would change in the past of the world and one thing that they want to assure about their future since they gets the chance to skip to the future. Here the students will understand the function and usage of “if conditionals” without them even knowing that they are learning. Likewise several different language content were taught in ways the students enjoy learning in the classrooms by me. 

    Throughout my internship the lesson plans were always double checked and well arranged before implementing them in the classrooms. Yet sometimes certain challenges lingered while following the lesson plans in the real classroom settings such as some students being over excited about the fun and energetic activities that I have included in the lesson plans. When this happens the classroom tend to gout of the teacher’s control since selected amount of students’ hyperactive behavior can lead the whole into a chaos. As the solution I have come up with solutions such as no speaking time that I introduced them as “shush time” where they have to place their pointing finger over their mouth instantly making the whole class silent and then I slowly resume teaching in the classroom. And also when it comes to the upper grades such as grade 10 and 11, the silent treatment made a huge impact on the situations when the classrooms become uncontrollable proving that silence is louder that shouting all over your classroom trying to make your students calm. Here I stop teaching in the middle of the lesson and wait for few seconds with a stern and patient look in my face then the students instantly calm themselves down and gets ready to pay their attention back into the lesson. In the grade 8 classroom there was a student who as remarkably hyperactive when compared to the other students in the classroom but was a very clever student who literary grasps everything with less effort. The problem with him in the classroom was that he finishes the assigned task before the others and try distracting others from finishing their own tasks. As the solution for this issue I always made sure that I come prepared to the classroom with extra worksheets for him in order to make him occupied with work so that he would not distract others in the classroom. Even though the lesson plans were well structured when implementing them in the real classroom setting, time management was a little challenging. I managed to overcome it with generous use of timer and alarms through a smart phone to always make sure the students are finishing their assigned tasks within the given timeframe.

    With the promising feedback from the respective English language teachers and the teacher in-charge, it is proven that I could make considerable impact of the students’ language learning in the school. Even the constantly held parents meetings also brought positive feedback about the way how the students have improved in all English language based skills in ways they love learning.

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References: 

Abbasi, A. M. (2011). A survey of teaching strategies in ESL classroom.

Brown, D. F. (2004). Urban teachers’ professed classroom management strategies: Reflections of culturally responsive teaching. Urban Education, 39(3), 266-289.