Journal IX

APPENDIX 3: POST OBSERVATION STUDENT

TEACHER’S SELF-EVALUATION FORM (Journal)

Name: _Astrid Yarleth Trujillo Urriago_ Date: _Monday, June 3, 2019 to Friday, June 7, 2019_

Write a reflection about the classes you oriented this week (bear in mind the following aspects: what you planned, what you did, and what you would do differently if you were to teach your lessons again). Give examples and descriptions of those situations that, in your view, are relevant to your learning experience.

Ninth Week: Teaching and Testing

During the ninth week of my pedagogical practicum, I implemented two lessons since with the third group a test about the learned topics was carried out. In this sense, for Wednesday’s session, I prepared the questions for the test, which were about comparative and superlative adjectives and modal verbs when being used for making requests. The test was developed during the first moments of the class and after all the students had finished, I was in charge of checking the answers along with the students. I asked different students to read the questions and the corresponding answer for each. Therefore, students know how well they did in this test immediately. I realized that students do not have any problem regarding comparative and superlative adjectives. However, in terms of modal verbs, they got confused about the degree of formality of these. Consequently, I think something I should do differently about this is giving students only two options instead of three so that they can see the difference between these easily and do not get confused.

On Thursday, I had a class with students from the first level. The topic to be taught was “some and any with countable and uncountable nouns”. At the beginning of the class, students worked on the vocabulary of the book by categorizing groups of food according to the group they belong to, for example, dairy products, drinks, and protein. In terms of vocabulary, there were no major problems. Subsequently, I proceeded to explain the countable and uncountable nouns. Even though I provided examples and explained the reasons why some nouns are uncountable, they kept on making sense of the Spanish situation for telling that they can count those nouns. In the end, they understood a little more about the topic and worked on the activities. I explained to them how to make questions and express sentences with both positive and negative meaning. When I asked them to classify the nouns from the first exercise, they could do it without any inconvenience. The listening exercise I planned to do, was successful, students understood the audio track and could answer the questions about it. However, the time passed so fast that it was impossible to carry out the last activity. Then, I thought it was better that students had the topic clear instead of jumping to the other activity. I have to consider the time management and how I address my explanations for me not to take more time than the estimated.

Finally, on Friday, I introduced the modal verbs when used for giving advice. The verbs to be worked for this lesson were “could, should, ought to, must, and have to”. I prepared a reading exercise for introducing the topic and asked students to try to tell me what the letter was about. Students managed to do so. In the beginning, they tried to participate but at the end of the reading exercise, they just stopped doing so. However, I tried to give them the first idea for them to complete it. After that, I told students that in the text there were some specific words that we used when giving advice. I wrote an example of a piece of advice on the board using all the modal verbs and explained to students when we use each one of them. The topic was addressed successfully since students understood right away how and when to use these modal verbs. I also asked them to tell me how they would advise their parents and their little siblings. Afterward, they played a game in which there were some problems or situations to which they had to provide a piece of advice. They played in small groups and at the end; I asked them to read the last situation they advised to and the corresponding piece of advice. At the end of the class, students were given a situation to which they had to provide as many pieces of advice as possible and then, we reviewed all the situations and advice given.