Pedagogy Reflection

Introduction

This year was rich in information, experience, and knowledge. I took a lot with me from this great year. This year I learned how to reflect on lessons, so in this book, you will see my reflection on the pedagogy lectures.

Lesson plans 

I think the most helpful lectures were the ones that taught us how to plan a lesson. I believe that the secret to a successful lesson is good planning before it. In the beginning, it took hours to think about how to plan a good lesson. But after discussing it many times in the pedagogy lessons it became easier and easier. Each time we shared ideas in the class, good sources for materials, and different advice from each one’s experience, it helped us to develop our planning skills. Now it takes like an hour maximum.

Teaching Reading  

Teaching reading lessons were also so helpful. Before those lessons, I was afraid to teach reading. We actually planned a lesson in the class in pairs and had the chance to listen to our colleagues’ ideas. It wasn’t as hard or complicated as I thought. But all we need to do as teachers is good preparing ahead of time. We need to have a pre-reading activity to draw the pupils in such as a game or a picture connected to the topic of the text they will read. Secondly, we need while-reading activities to help the pupils understand the content, such as asking questions before reading and asking the pupils to look for the answers while reading the text. Finally, we should do post-reading activities so the student can use the knowledge they got from reading. After this lesson, I applied what I learned in the class I taught every Wednesday and it was a very successful lesson.

L1 in the classroom

Learning about the use of L1 was a significant lecture. I learned when should I use it and when not and how much I should use it. at the beginning of the year, I was afraid to use English most of the lesson time because I thought the pupils wouldn’t understand it. But after I learned about it in pedagogy I started to use L2 more in class and to my surprise, the pupils were able to understand me without translating I just added some hand gestures to my words. When Jennifer came to observe me in the second semester she noticed the difference in the usage compared to the first semester.

One thing I found helpful about the practical training at school was having a colleague there with me. We both had the chance to observe each other’s lessons and learn from them.

Having a partner ensured me and her a feedback every time we gave a lesson. We saw the mistakes that each one of us made and we tried to avoid them. We also shared successful ideas after actually trying them in class and seeing good results. However, there were sometimes when one idea that worked well with a specific class, didn’t work with another. For example, I did a game in sixth grade and it worked nicely, on the contrary when my colleague Shahrazad did it in fifth grade, she couldn’t control the class. So we learned that each class contains different students with different personalities and needs.

Many advantages were taken from having one colleague there, imagine how much more could be taken if I had more colleagues. More people means more ideas and more diversity. Anyway, I had the opportunity to be exposed to other colleagues’ experiences in the pedagogy lessons every Tuesday.

Need to learn in depth

I think we need to learn more about how to deal with the diversity of pupils in a class. How to take a topic and create activities that match the level of each pupil? I observed my cooperating teacher once doing that and it needed to be prepared and planned before.

In addition, writing is a hard skill to teach. I am not sure that I can teach it yet. There are many things to care about while teaching it. In order to write correctly and fluently, pupils need vocabulary, grammar, punctuation marks, and spelling. I don’t know yet how to check all that for at least 20 students and give them feedback and correction for the mistakes and why it is incorrect.