JOURNAL ENTRY #14: PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE EXPERIENCE

As today I've finished my last practice session from my Professional Practice class, I would like you to share with you a little bit of my experience. Some months ago, when I learned that one of the subjects for this semester was going to be Professional Practice, I was a little bit concerned as, although I had been working for almost a year, I didn't feel that I was experienced enough to be constantly observed by someone whose particular job was criticizing my class, even though it was constructive criticism. Despite that, I felt that I needed to challenge myself and I just decided to go for it. I was lucky enough to have all my practice sessions in the place that I'm currently working, which is a little private English institution in Azcapotcalzo and, although I thought that it was going to be a bit easier as I was familiar with the place, it surprisingly was not as simple as I expected. I kinda felt that I had the responsibility of stepping up my English-teacher game as I was dealing, not only with a subject from school but with my actual job. 

Once the first sessions started, I learned a lot about myself as an educator. I realized that I was very patient with students and really creative when it came to developing ludic activities (especially impromptu), a strategy that, I think, all teachers develop (or at least should) over their professional years. As well, I learned many things about my lacks, which were mostly technical details from the lesson plans that I designed. According to my tutor, I had "very good lesson plans that could be even better" if I fixed those minor particularities, which really motivated me to look for new activities, change my class dynamics, and be more thoughtful about what I was including in each section of my plan. 

Reading my notes from the last few months, I recapped some recommendations that I was given through this brief but insightful journey and I would like to share them with you as I found them very useful, especially if you are seeking to polish your planning skills: 

1. Manage your time: Have realistic expectations about how much time each activity will take. Avoid losing a lot of time in activities that can take minutes to do. Sometimes it is good to set an alarm or timer to let students know that they have a time limit and they need to rush.

2. Write clear objectives: Try not to have a very general or unrealistic objective that you know you are not going to accomplish in one single class. Instead, try to come up with simple tasks that students will be able to do at the end of each session using one part of the learned vocabulary or grammar (e.g. "At the end of the class, Ss' will be able to describe their bedroom using adjectives of shapes, color and size")

3. Spanish can be helpful: Even though we know as English teachers that overusing Spanish in the classroom is not a really good way to motivate students to practice the language, it might be a good idea to use a little of their L1 in initial stages as sometimes they might feel overwhelmed, especially when it comes to instructions, issue that eventually if not addressed can lead them to become unmotivated and see the language as a burden instead of an opportunity. 

4. Distribute activities for skills development: Don't focus only on one language skill. Make sure that your students can practice all skills (listening, writing, reading, speaking) within the same session. If you don't have a lot of time, try to take time to distribute each skill into the sessions you have scheduled so students keep practicing the language in all its extensions.

5. Try to be detailed: Write each section of your lesson plan bearing in mind that someone else (let's say, a substitute teacher that is about to take over your class) will read it and will have to be able to understand every single stage clearly in order to take action. Attaching scans of the book pages or worksheets to be used might be helpful to make the following more accessible to readers. 

Have you ever faced any of these complications in your classroom? How have you dealt with them? What is something that you have recently learned about yourself as a teacher? Let me know in the comments.