Initial ‘hot feedback’

Lesson Plan and in-class presentation

Teaching Practice 4: Lesson Plan

Fillers and connections Teaching Practice 4

Fillers and connections

Opening thoughts

So this was my final teaching practice. It was not delivered in the format I had initially planned or expected, but nonetheless it is done. However I can’t shake this feeling that the whole thing has been a bit anticlimactic. Due to the ongoing situation with Covid-19, this lesson was very different in three ways; my lesson was taught online, my class consisted of one student and that student was not in the UK. These changes combined into quite the challenge and I felt completely out of my comfort zone. As mentioned in my hot feedback recording, I’ve only been teaching online for about four weeks and I am still struggling with the pedagogic side of delivering lessons. The technology side of things is fine, I have no problems with learning software but not being in a physical space, flipping the classroom for large portions of the session and also not having other students to bring into the session proved very difficult. I honestly hadn’t felt like this since I was a novice teacher, fresh from the CELTA. But I suppose that is the nature of teaching; challenges and difficulties will always arise and an expert teacher would rise to the challenge and seek to overcome these issues.f

Anyway, moving away from the negativity surrounding circumstances; one positive of teaching online is the ability to record segments of the lesson (or the whole thing altogether in this case). This has allowed for instant access to a useful video which shows both students and teachers clearly, and at the same time it displays the PowerPoint presentation much clearer than using a traditional camera in a physical classroom. This has allowed me to take a much more detailed look at the lesson. These were the areas of both strength and consideration that I have observed from analysing the video.

Areas of strength

One aspect of my class that I was proud of was the amount of content I had planned for the lesson. Since the first teaching practice, I have gradually decreased the number of lesson stages. Back in the first formal observation, I had planned too much for one hour of teaching and as a result I did not meet my learning objectives. This has gradually gotten better with each subsequent observation and this one was no exception. Though the staging was not as smooth as the third observation, I was able to get to the end of my planned sessions. Now that was not to say that I didn’t have to adapt some of my lesson stages. The fourth stage (free practice) was reduced to save time. The first couple of stages overran by five minutes or so, so instead of asking my student to create three questions, I reduced the task down to one. In the moment I thought three questions to me, whilst allowing her to practise question forms, would ultimately lead to my teacher talking time (hereby referred to as TTT) increasing more than it already had (more on that in areas for consideration).

With regards to my student, I believe she reached the target objectives for the lesson and demonstrated an understanding of both time fillers and non-defining relative clauses. The flexi-stage at the end of the class was not implemented due to time constraints, but if I had had another fifteen or twenty minutes, I would have encouraged more free practice with feedback for each part. Perhaps I still planned a little too much, perhaps it was nerves on my part that extended the other lesson stages.

Areas for consideration

As mentioned before, I was not entirely happy with my TTT. I have worked hard to reduce it in my face-to-face classes but here everything seemed to go out of the window. Part of it was me over-explaining tasks or giving too many examples, but I’m not sure why this was the case. I think naturally in a one-to-one scenario, there’s going to be more TTT due to the fact that it’s either the teacher or the one learner speaking. I’m no stranger to face-to-face one-to-ones but I think the online setting coupled with the fact that this was a formal observation amplified this. I think this is ultimately where my most recent critical incident post come into play. Learning a whole new format for something you are so familiar with can be trying and even painful but ultimately it will lead to becoming a stronger teacher with a wider array of skills. But I still feel like a novice when teaching online. At the time of typing, I have set up a forum/meeting for my colleagues to share ideas for how to structure and deliver online classes, which I hope will lead to some revelations and theoretical knowledge to assist with the creation of online learning content.

Closing thoughts

At the end of this experience and indeed this module, I have learned a lot about my teaching. I have learned the value of the ‘less is more’ approach, how to manage the expectations of my learners and when to change the course of the lesson when things either need more time, or are simply not working. I have learned to trust in my abilities but not become complacent; there’s always something to learn and there’s always room for improvement. Regarding continued professional development, my action points are as follows:

1. Seek further training on better practice for how to conduct online lessons. This may be a webinar or even an online course in order to ease the transition between face-to-face learning and online learning.
2. Practise reducing lesson stages even further. While this has improved in my face-to-face observations, this has become an issue again for teaching online. I think I can sometimes underestimate the amount of time needed for feedback and learners often surprise me with emergent language issues. By closely adhering to the ‘less is more’ philosophy I spoke about in blog posts from last semester, I can realistically achieve my lesson outcomes and still allow adequate time for feedback with the learners.
3. Conduct further research into the effective practice of one-to-one lessons. During the ELT Methodologies module last sememster, I gave a presentation on one-to-ones based on my experiences and some light research on the subject. I found there wasn’t a vast range of literature on the subject yet materials have been published on this topic. I wish to actively seek out these materials in order to help me maximise the time spent with a single learner and to provide the opportunity for the learner to practise the language as much as possible while reducing TTT.