Microteaching Reflection

Microteaching Reflection Tiffany

Before I started to design my lesson plan, I had no idea about what to teach and how to teach. It was really a big deal for me to select teaching materials. Fortunately, the upcoming Christmas Day gave me some inspiration. At first, I would like to use my materials to teach junior high school students because I would like to teach them after I graduated from NCU. However, I found out my lesson might be too difficult for junior high school students so I changed my mind to set my target students level in my lesson plan as senior high. I thought about it for several days and I then decided to use the topic of Christmas to teach reading for senior high school students.
Actually, while I was doing my microteaching, students just interacted well with the teacher, me, and answered questions most of the time. However, I knew that when I become a study teacher, what the situation or responses of students I encounter in real teaching might not be so active. Thus, I think there seems to be still a long way to go and a lot of things to learn to cope with any kind of situations out of my expectation which I might come across in the future even though I still expect that there are some students who are voluntary and willing to respond me. If students are silent when I am teaching in the future, I will look for many possible ways to encourage my students to answer.
All in all, I think I really learn a lot in this practical microteaching and receiving peer comments. In real teaching on the stage, I could realize my good points as well as weakness and try to improve my actual teaching in the future.

Peer Evaluation & Teacher Comments
Most of my classmates mentioned that it’s good for me to provide a clear, detailed, and complete lesson plan, covered with listening, speaking, reading, and writing areas. Besides, I’m glad to hear from most of them that they were interested in my lesson content and gave high praises on my attractive and well-prepared materials. I also think it’s a good idea to combine holidays and English learning, as the teacher commented. Most of the classmates said that my speech and explanations were clear and fluent as well to help them to learn about the topic and useful reading strategies. They also mentioned that to play the songs with music, and to use multimedia resource (the movie trailers) indeed made the lesson more interesting. All in all, I really appreciate their positive comments.

Changes I will make
However, there was also something that I should improve in my teaching. First, I thought I will try to add more eye-contact and smile when I teach next time. Many of them just mentioned that my facile expression was calm but suggested that giving more eye-contact or interaction can help me show more confidence and get student’s attention. I will also try to add more interaction with the classmates in my lesson. I think maybe I can ask students more questions about what they do to celebrate Christmas first before starting the reading main text first to make them feel more interested in the Christmas tradition. Besides, I have to pay more attention on the time limit next time. I will try to give a better control to my teaching time in my future teaching. In addition, I will try to use English definitions to explain the words next time, trying to make the vocabulary part more challenging for my students.

Methods, approaches and techniques
In my microteaching, I used “Grammar Translation” in the explanations of the lyric cloze and “cooperative learning” in reading part by asking them to discuss with group members. In the part of teaching vocabulary, I just explain the vocabulary and grammar in Chinese. Next time I will try to use English to explain the word definitions and try to make the vocabulary part more challenging and interesting for my students. I will try to use some techniques such as objects, collocations, or analyzing vocabulary to help them to memorize the words. I will also encourage them to learn new words in the context and encourage them to guess or applying other reading strategies. In designing this micro teaching, I asked them pre-questions to recall the learners’ central background knowledge related to the topic before reading. Besides, in my teaching, I tried to encourage the students to combine ‘bottom-up” processes (decoding and understanding words, phrases, sentences in the text) and “top-down” ones (our expectations, previous knowledge constructs or schemata of the text content. I discussed the topic of the text first before reading and tried to arouse their expectations as well as to elicit connections between references in the texts and situations known to the learners. I also teach them to use reading strategies like skimming, scanning, and guessing from the context to help them read.

I think this micro teaching is really a good experience for me to make me to understand more clearly about my teaching advantages and weakness. Thanks for all comments from everyone to let me know how my teaching is and learn a lot from them. Maybe my first microteaching still has room for improvements, but everyone's opinions and teacher's advices all help me to know how to improve. And most importantly, I think practices will make perfect in the long run.