Task 4: My teaching unit report
For my teaching sequence my teacher asked me to work with the past tenses, in the beginning she asked me to focus on regular verbs but things changed once I started planning the sessions.
The sessions were planned to work the past tenses of the regular verbs through the development of a biography and an autobiography but it is quite difficult to avoid certain important irregular verbs while writing and, in the end, we used both regular and irregular verb to write complete texts.
At the starting point of this teaching sequence, I have to admit I did not know how it would turn out and that is why I planned lots of different activities and ways to model how to write a biography and an autobiography. Also, something that worried me a little bit was the fact of including a session or two in which the students would have the need to use an online tool they have never used before, but I was more worried about my capacity to explain how to use this tool than in their capacity to discover how to use it.
The first session was absolutely amazing, not because the kids got right away what I was explaining but because they showed excitement to see me doing the class, as they told me after my sessions, they liked to have me inside the class and preparing things for them. The activities were fluid and they worked actively during all moments. The best moment was one that worried me because I selected a biography of a young girl, Anne Frank, who died in horrible conditions and I was afraid that would be too much for my students at some point, but, I have to say that they seemed pretty touch by this girl’s life and what her family was able to do to survive and how good people helped them to survive all those months. I have to say that in my opinion all that we did was pretty simple but once we started discussing things about the biography we read they seemed to enjoy the topic. And one really good point is that they loved working without their books.
The second session started with a discussion on what a biography should and should not have, at the start of the session I was not very optimistic as I was able to see, during the previous days with the other teachers, that the kids did not participate much during the discussions made in class and that is why I was concerned for the development of the class. I think that making everybody understand that the important aspect of the session was for them to interact with me, to build a biography all together despite the language he or she felt comfortable using (Catalan, Spanish or English). I wanted them to add ideas in any language I could understand, of course, and then I just reformulated in English their words after they spoke and that was a success. Some of them tried hard to speak in English, using their knowledge to formulate simple sentences, that was something important to me, the effort they show to the task was really nice for me as the planner of that session.
One thing I want to criticize about one of the activities I planned is that, when doing the exercise in which they had to identify the parts of a biography in a written example, I saw, when checking the results that not all of the students did completely understand the different sections or maybe I did not write them in the model differentiating them enough for them to be able to determine what went into each section. And now it is something I would change to make it more clear for them to see.
The third and fourth session were pretty similar. The students gathered information about their famous character and they wrote a biography following a template we used during session number two. I have to mention that they had a really hard time looking for the information, they had 0 practice when it came to looking for information online, and I think that was a bit of a problem as they took more time than what I was expecting when doing this part of the task. Of course, it was my fault because I did not think about this problem happening while planning the session, I assumed they all knew how to use google and the basic biography page, Wikipedia. As a result of that, my mentor and I had to help the students select the ideal information to answer the guide questions they had to write the biography, at the end we made it work as best as we could. I have to say that not all results were amazing, I think I was expecting a bit more but I was pretty happy with the fact that they enjoyed writing something about what they researched for.
For the 5th session (the one shown in the video) a transition happened, the autobiography was introduced through several activities, first comparing both types of text, the biographies and the autobiographies. The activity of the circles was pretty easy for them they got a lot of the answers correct even though I used some tricky sentences to prove that, even though sometimes they get blocked and think that they can’t do it, but at the end they prove themselves they can do whatever they want if they try it. After the circles' activity, we worked on an autobiography through a listening activity. As all of them are preparing for Competències Bàsiques, listening activities are important to prepare themselves in order to get used to the language and answering questions while listening to an audio that does not stop. The results of this practice were pretty good, they showed me their capacities with listening. The last activity was probably the easiest one for them as it only consisted of determining whether some little texts were biographies or autobiographies. They did that activity in like 2 minutes, approximately, and all of them were like screaming “this is so easy” but when I told them that I could make it a bit more difficult in situ if they felt like it they all screamed NO at the same time.
When the moment came to write their autobiographies everything went much smoother than their previous writing experience. They needed less help from the teachers in the class and the results show an actual improvement for the majority of the students. Another important thing to mention is that they LOVED knowing they were explaining their stories and I would read them and discover more about them.
Of course, they have shown some little mistakes but, in the end, I see the improvements they have made in their pieces of writing. I compare those two texts they created because they are quite similar and thanks to that I can see their improvements while writing.
In this example you can see the difference, in the first text, the student could not even write in the language required, he did not feel like doing it but, for the second writing piece he wrote in English with confidence and even though it has some mistakes he was visibly more comfortable with the language.
The last part of the teaching sequence was to use Storybird in order to create a comic of one of their favourite episodes of their lives. Even though they loved using something they have never used and they were pretty intuitive when using it and creating their piece, my explanation was necessary to go to the point and help them create something they would love at the end. In the end, when they finished their piece I asked if they were happy and proud of their piece and all of them said that they were but they were shy when having to show it to their classmates or people from my university. I asked them if they would mind if I uploaded they comics online and they felt really, really shy about it, I think it was very personal for them to create that they feel a bit exposed.
The sessions were much easier than what I thought initially even though there were not perfect, of course. Sometimes it was quite difficult for me to be able to control the class while it was happening. They got a bit disperse sometimes and it was difficult for me to make some students concentrate on what was happening in the class on certain occasions. The help of my mentor was required sometimes in order to maintain the class calm even though at the end of the teaching sequence she told me that I handled thing pretty well when I was in front of the class, the thing that made me really happy and proud.
I know that my activities are not the most dynamic and fun because I have seen how when these students are given the opportunity to do a dynamic activity they take advantage of the situation and misbehave. They are really active and talkative and I really think that they know that I am just a teacher-to-be but not a real teacher yet and they test my limits as much as they can and that is why, my mentor and I, agreed that it was not the best decision to create really dynamic sessions or activities in which they would have to move around. But when we finished everything they told me that they liked the activities, they showed me engagement in most of the tasks, even though they lost their focus sometimes, and they also pointed out to me that stepping out of their normal English class routine was nice.
So yes, my interventions were not perfect, my activities were not perfect and I was not the perfect teacher but no teacher is ever completely perfect.
