2rd Year Students Pedagogy Reflection- Adi Sturm

Lectures and activities that I found useful- 

planning in semester 1-

In the first semester, we dedicated much of our time to learning how to prepare our lesson plans correctly.

This was the first time that we touched on a topic that connects directly to our work in schools. We first learned the basics of the lesson plan and what is the structure that we need to work according to. Then we went further by starting to create the lessons by ourselves, at first it was a great challenge because I never planned a lesson before, but as time passed it was easier for me, what helped a lot is getting feedback on whether it is good or not by my friends, lectures and cooperating teacher. I was looking for different opinions to maximize my ideas and structure.

Teaching Speaking in semester 2-

Speaking is the one skill we learned that is one of the important and hard ones, the pupils in the Israeli classroom barely speak English for many reasons and that creates a gap between speaking and the other skills. We learned how and when to combine speaking activities for our lessons and that we need to teach using only English in the lesson.

For me, it was a challenge to use only English in my lessons because the pupils tend to not understand or want the teacher to explain in Hebrew.

Etai conference-

In the first semester we got to experience a real conference that was only for English teachers from the southern district of Israel, it was a learning experience for me as a future English teacher to see how those kinds of conferences work and the tools that are given there. I talked to different teachers and they shared their experiences and it was nice. In one of the lectures, we learned how to combine videos in our lesson and it helped me to do that in my lessons because I believe that visual learning is super important and helpful

practical training-

What I found useful concerning my practical training at school is that we discussed our ideas and lesson plans the day before we went to school in the pedagogy course. Some of the students presented their lesson plans and some talked about them but the idea that we had the forum to share and get feedback from our colleagues and lecture, helped me to be more confident in class and even change my lessons for the best. That is why I think that feedbacks and observations are so important in order to improve as teachers.

What I would like to study next year-

one thing that was not discussed is how to deal with behavior issues in the class and what should I do if pupils do not want to participate in the lesson. many times, during my lessons I had those pupils who didn’t participate or didn’t want to open their books and do the work that the rest of the class does, and I didn’t know how to convince or approach them in the best way to make them more interested. I also think that the fact that I came only once a week didn’t create that trusting connection with those pupils for me to tell them what to do and even create worksheets, especially for them because maybe their level in English is lower than the rest of the class.

what I would like to learn about in more depth next year-

for next year, I would like to learn and dive in-depth on how to teach grammar, especially how to present to the pupils the different structures and how to explain them in the best way so that they can understand. Grammar is one of the most challenging things when it comes to teaching English and I feel that this year we focused more on the shallow part and the basics rather than on how to teach it.