I was quite excited to do my 3rd
microteaching on table manners. I have a personal interest in anything related
to food and nutrition. :)
Where to start? How to put my thoughts about
my microteaching on paper?
Well… I felt that it was better than I
had expected. I felt that my text was well received as we all can relate to
dining, dining etiquette… Students were amused by the fact that it contained
words such as “belch” and “pass gas” contrary to their expectations I guess.
This was one of the main reasons why I had picked this piece of authentic text
among a zillion available out there…
That being said, after watching my video,
I had much to reflect on.
I found it much easier to imagine and
treat my native-speaker classmates as my students this time around. However, I still
had that feeling, to some extent, as if I was racing against myself to get to
the “better” parts of my presentation stage. I had really hoped to have the
opportunity to go through my first activity at the very least but my time was
up...
On the bright side, I realized that I did
interact more with the students as they were doing pair work. This was
something I had reflected upon before and has been trying to improve.
Furthermore, I tried my best to manage
the class. There is the natural tendency for the “students” to start giggling,
talking (signs of losing focus) after the first few microteachings. Therefore,
when I called on one of them when not paying attention, it was met with humor
and a few commented that “I had eyes in the back.” Well, I wish… :)
I had planned to do more comprehension
checks by asking a student to report back what he/she was supposed to be doing
before they proceeded with the task at hand. However, in the heat of the
moment, it sadly escaped me...
It was good practice having an
opportunity to tackle vocabulary questions come up prematurely. In fact, this
had never happened to me in my classroom. I meant to just tell John to be a
little patient and that we would talk about all unknown words from the text in
just a little while. Then, somehow, I decided to write his name and the word he
had asked about on the WB. In fact, my initial thought was that this would be
sort of like a promise, a contract, if you will, I had made with John in this
regard. Literally, it was too late by the time I had written his name on the WB
with the word “fart” next to it. I know that everyone was amused by that.
However, after the fact it made me think… Could this have possibly offended anyone
with a different group of students? {Thank you in advance for your
feedback. :)}
Overall, I thought that I did make better
use of MICs (WB, gestures, repetition – with directions and verbal repetition
of what I had written on the WB while underlining the words “five” and “eight”
as an additional MIC– and giving examples)
throughout. As for CIs, I mainly utilized T-S-S-T (I made sure that students used
the question I had modeled, which was also written on the WB), pair work as
well as asking students to summarize and report what they have read in the text.
When I watched the video, I witnessed
something funny. In an attempt to use simpler and more authentic language, I
asked the students: “Any questions about the questions?” It would have been
better if I had instead said: “Anyone got any questions?”
Lastly, as my last BU processing task, I
asked students to circle all adjectives (recycled TLC) found in the first
paragraph. I did check to see if they had remembered what we had covered last
class on adjectives. However, I only asked Jeff and David to give me an example
of an adjective. It occurred to me while I was watching the video: “How about
the rest of the students?” I had no way of knowing because I hadn’t checked
with them. It would have been much more effective if I had asked the whole
class to write down a sentence and circle the adjective in that sentence. I
could have then randomly nominated a few to share their sentences or used
T-S-S-T.
Although I believe that this
microteaching was better than my last, surely there are areas I need and want
to work on… Till next time!! :)
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