Reflection based on actualization of Lesson Plan

(Note: Video of first 15 minutes has been added.)

Reflection:

This reflection is based on the class I prepared the assigned lesson-plan for.  It’s a second grade middle-school class of about 40 students and their skill-levels vary greatly, from novice to advanced. I’m assigned a unit in a book to teach that I can supplement and it’s mostly centered on oral communications. Of course this lesson is different in the sense it was much more thoroughly prepared than usual.

However, preparation does not always equal success. How I planned my lesson and how I performed it in a challenging classroom environment shows that you can’t anticipate all eventualities. I wanted to start the class with some conversational dialogic discourse, but the students weren’t very receptive to my questions and their answers were generally muted or confined to a couple words. Consequently, I became flustered and moved on from greetings faster than I would have liked. I was hoping that by bringing up their exams they could provide some anecdotes or discuss how they did with their fellow students. Having prepared as much as I did, I expected more focus, but instead I found that whenever I stumbled or lost confidence in how an activity was going, I’d move on. Thus, I did depart from my prepared lesson, even if I tried to maintain the basic tenets of what I had planned.

In retrospect I’m disappointed I didn’t try to build on the answers of individual students. Instead, I was trying to speak to the whole class, which is pretty much impossible. I could have been more forceful with my attempts to elicit follow-up answers by giving more feedback and displaying more energy. I could also have had them talk to each other about their exams, but being the first five minutes of class I think I was worried about losing them before I even began. A few minutes later, an attempt to have students relax and discuss sports they’re into was a lot more successful, focused and produced a lot of open, referential questions that helped establish our upcoming discussion about skills.

Another thing I noticed in reviewing my tape is that I tend to “dumb down” my speaking in the class to suit lower-proficiency listening. While it’s useful to slow speech and gesture more, what’s not useful is engaging in broken grammar as I seem to occasionally do in an unconscious and misguided effort to have students understand me. I think this is another classroom confidence issue I have to overcome. Having students understand my directions is not an accomplishment, when those directions are delivered in a corrupt fashion. Teaching proper syntax one moment and then speaking an almost “pidgin” English the next, presents a huge contradiction in my teaching style and something I should actively avoid turning into a habit.

There were some successes though. I found by devoting more time to chunking and repetition, the students became more familiar with the sentence structures I wanted them to practice and their comprehension improved as well. As a result, they could have more fruitful dialogic conversations with their partners when I assigned them a personalization task, such as asking each other what their talents are. Visual cues and schema were also used to help the lower-level students identify certain vocabulary terms with familiar pictures.

In conclusion, I think the meticulously prepared lesson-plan did improve the class, but there’s still problems that inevitably arise, both in the unwieldy and unpredictable dynamic 40 middle-schoolers bring to a class and in the personal faults and temperamental shortcomings that I, as a teacher, sometimes bring to the class. The former will always be a factor I have to anticipate, but I can work on the latter.