Essay: Reflection Paper – Teaching Demonstration

Reflection Paper
Teaching Demonstration
In MTE course .we are required as students to present a teaching demonstration as part of our assessment ,so our lecturer asks us to write a reflection about teaching demo assignment . Giving a successful demo can be challenging, especially for students who have not taught before. Thankfully ,I have my own teaching career. When I started this route, I promised myself that I was going to accept every challenge and take advantage of every opportunity in MTE course. I trust Madam Maznh and I knew she will be there for me with her guidance, hand-holding and support if anything happens.
Active learning is something I value as a teacher and a student, so when I began planning
my teaching demonstration, active learning was my first priority. As I mentioned early, I have had quite a lot of teaching experience and felt confident that I could successfully plan my lesson and its activities . My teaching style has been shaped by various teaching experiences. For three years I taught English classes and used the classroom as a laboratory to try a variety of different teaching styles and methods. I found that I enjoy leading discussion and prefer to have students present what they know to the class.
I think the most important thing to start with in preparing for the assignment is finding out what kind of teaching demo I will be giving . Demos can take a few forms. Of course ,I chose the demo which is given to a group of faculty acting as students. Then, when I started to prepare for my teaching demo, the idea of the lesson and the skill I am going to choose came to my mind quite quickly because in my opinion , the preeminent thing in teaching is creating a livable environment to the students and also I wanted to impress Madam Mazanh and I sought to show her that I have good experience as a teacher .
I have decided a lesson about character adjectives and my focus was on speaking and vocabulary .My lesson was intended for upper-intermediate high school language class, covering 45 minute period .Luckily Madam Maznah gave us the format that we have to follow in writing our lesson plan which I personally was so comfortable with. I chose speaking skill for the reason that I sought my teaching demo to have more language and to make more fun .At first I thought that the group teaching demonstration would be easy, especially because I wanted to do something dealing with verbal communication .however ,the process of working with adults and pretending they are teenagers was a challenge. It got to the point that more than stop seeing them as my classmates and seeing them as youngsters. I have in my lesson three stages pre –speaking, while speaking and post- speaking as well as homework part. The time given for the lesson was to cover three activities during 45-minute demo, but the class may need less time than I anticipate because Madam Maznh asked us to draw to a close everything in 20 minutes ,therefore. I have tried to shorten my activities and my demo to finish on time .
The general objectives were to develop vocabulary based on the lesson linguistic content and to help the students to communicate better using the target language as well as develop their ability to recreate the written thoughts of others through vocal delivery. While the specific aims are by the end of this class the students should be able to analyze and identify character adjectives , use se character adjectives in discussion and in describing others ,and improve their vocabulary when describing character, especially when giving examples, exchanging information .I contextualized these aims for the students in my class by allowing them to directly interact with the lesson content .
As much as I was stressed and lost sleep over the teaching demonstration, it was an exhilarating experience. The week of my demo, my feelings went from fear to worry to tranquil the morning of the demo. The most surprising emotion was fear as I worked as a teacher before but maybe because it is not real teaching class and it is for assessment . However, when the time came to teach, I felt confident and I was ready with my lesson because I prepared myself well as well as my lesson is valuable , straightforward and motivating ,so “why to be afraid ” .
A large chunk of time was to activities in my lesson plan. I have started my lesson by refreshing the students’ understanding of the character adjectives that they have learned already by showing four pictures of different people I assumed my students are familiar with and I asked them to utilize group of character adjectives to describe these people . In this part I showed them Barak Obama, Alwaleed bin Tala, Cristiano Rolando and prince Diana. It roughly took about ten minute. I liked the way my students reacted to that as I felt they turned to real students .Actually it was good start because the pre-speaking part is about engaging the students immediately in the lesson since this activity was like a link between the previous and the new .
After that I distributed a worksheet to the students and this worksheets contains everything, I mean the whole three activities and the homework part. Then, I put the students in pairs to do the quiz as the second activity. In this activity, I required them to say their opinions about their partner ,it was entertaining and smooth everyone accepted others’ opinion. Continuing with the parts, I asked learners to complete matching activity and articulate their guesses. I had allotted for this part nearly twenty minutes .Finally,the post-speaking activity, categorizing the adjectives as negative, positive or both, was my best because the students spoke out their own thoughts and I knew it will certainly be debate about which are positive and negative qualities. . Much to my own amusement, I found this part utterly interesting as a discussion escalated into a heated debate between two of three students Monther ,Ahmed and Saed on whether we should consider ”shy” a positive or negative adjective .I gave them absolute freedom to select and speak. I accepted the debate even though I have the answers .This worked well because the students were able to come up with their own thoughts and ideas about what make a good and bad characters by using those adjectives. I used a variety of engagement strategies in my lesson to connect the students with the lesson .I brought them over to the rug area, so it was a comfortable and informal environment and I wanted the students to share their opinions and experiences.
After my teaching demonstration was over, some students showed me a positive feedback as Abd alaziz and sister Rohadia which makes me relaxed and My lecturer called me and spoke with me about how to make my demo better than this .On the whole Madam Maznah she said it was good demonstration but she suggested it may have been more practical if I gave further extent to students interactions. I will give attention more to that aspect and this is the only thing I would have done differently. I have learned that when I want to showcase my teaching skills, I have to be sure to strike a balance between the time I spend talking and the time I spend guiding student-centered activities.
Overall, the demonstration went well and I feel confident that many students learned something new about how to use and they were interested in the lesson .Also, I have got good feedback from them after the lesson which made me very proud .One of my strengths as a teacher that helped me in this demonstration is that I’m good at responding to students’ questions and comments. This is why I like leading discussions and why I enjoyed seeing that everyone was completely engaged and participating. There were not any disciplinary problems or students not participating. Be motivating, energetic teacher, take care of your students with respect accept their comments, welcome their questions, and show gratitude for their participation. Then, nothing will stop you from being a good teacher . This how I want to be as a teacher and I believed that I did present all my best to succeed my demonstration teaching. But I also believed that these would not be a success if it were only me. I passed this challenge because of my cooperating lecturer’s support . She helped me a lot in improving myself. As well as, it went well because of the cooperation of my students. Most of all because of the Almighty God!