The big summary of the first semester

This semester passed by really quickly. For 2 months straight I’ve been observing my mentor teacher in the classroom, but also I’ve conducted some micro-teaching. It was fun and challenging. Now it’s time to look back at it and reflect little more to summarize my new experiences.

During the practicum time, I’ve been enjoying each minute in the classroom. Observing such a young teacher doing a great job was very inspirational. It gives me a lot of hope for the future, maybe one day (if I learn hard enough) I will master teaching just like she did. My favorite group to observe was grade 0, and I got some new ideas of games and fun activities to do with such young learners.

At the very beginning, everything seems to be challenging, starting with planning a lesson, finishing on when to correct errors, but the biggest challenge that I face in the classroom is the management part. I am very humanistic, I know that children are just children and they might be loud or not listen to me for 100% of the time, but still, this is kind of depressing when you try to do something and they don’t care. Thanks to the observation and some courses at the University I managed to find a way to work with students, but also realized that sometimes it is not as simple as we might think. Parents’ expectations, students characteristics and the age of learners might influence our choices on how to deal with disruptions and problems. This is definitely a great thing to learn before finding a full-time job as a teacher.

The most memorable thing that I will take with me is the situation when a child from grade 0 didn’t want to talk to me and got offended because another student told me what her name was. Thanks to my mentor teacher I realized that things like this happen, every student is an individual person that might react differently for some situations. And it’s totally fine, go on, they follow anyways, just are offended and don’t want to participate for some time. The show must go on.

I have to admit that now I changed my perception of the relation between teacher and learners. Foreign language classes are different than integrated teaching in L1, it demands a different approach towards students. With very young learners the teacher is a care-taker, with young learners- the boss. I wanted to be more democratic, humanistic and open-minded, but the bitter reality made me realize it’s not working in this kind of class. So I became the boss (or at least I still try to).  What is also important to me is that students are undervalued by most of the adults. They know much more than we expect, and they will take over the lesson if you won’t do it.

For the future I want to work on giving instructions and implementing technology into my classes, I want to practice more to learn how to manage the time in the classroom and how to introduce students to successful cooperation.

It’s been a great time, am looking forward to the next semester CLIL practice. That might be a challenge as well!


Thanks for reading this blog, hope it was not too painful :O See you all next semester! Bye :D 

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