ES 1.1 - My Best Lesson

My best lesson - plan.pdf

Scarica PDF • 70KB

<-- Lesson plan with motivated choices

BINGO.pdf

Scarica PDF • 25KB

Motivation.xlsx

Scarica XLSX • 590KB

Handout -->

<-- Motivation template

Conditionals PowerPoint .pptx

Scarica PPTX • 2.79MB

PowerPoint -->

Rubric ES 1.1 - Grade B.pdf

Scarica PDF • 128KB

<-- Result & Feedback assessment ES 1.1

Motivation & Self-reflection

I decided that this would be my best lesson for several reasons. First of all, I strongly believe that mastering this topic is crucial, especially in formal settings, such as academic and professional circumstances. In my life, I have heard mistakes of any kind related to these tenses and, as a teacher, I feel responsible to prevent or fix this learning gap. I find these tenses fascinating and I am eager to pass my enthusiasm to my students.

Besides the topic, this is my best lesson because I planned it extremely attentively in order to respond to my students’ needs: I considered their age (14) and cognitive skills (deductive thinking is now possible), the setting (international secondary school), the fact that the educational background and language skills might be different for everyone, and I made realistic assumptions about their prior knowledge. I also considered that students memorise in different ways, so I integrated a colour-coded ICT presentation (PowerPoint) for those who have a photographic memory. Based on the feedback I received for Task 3, I have included transitions in my PowerPoint presentation, so I can present the information to students piece by piece and not as a whole block.

About the activities, since my teaching style is framed, I am a great supporter of active learning and that is why I chose a fun game (Conversational Bingo) in order for students to learn by doing. This also allowed me to ensure that teacher talking time and student talking time are equal.

Finally, I thought of the most effective methods to give feedback and to praise the students. As for the first one, the delayed correction would be the best way to expose all the errors without targeting anyone and correct them together to prevent others from making the same mistakes. As for praising students, this is part of my classroom management: I believe that if students feel appreciated by me, they will appreciate me back and, as a consequence, respect my rules and commit to my subject.

This may turn out not to be enough, so I am aware that I might have to reconsider my theory once I gain more experience. Moreover, so far I have only taught to small, well-behaved classes, so I am used to using a certain voice volume and I may have to train to adapt to bigger and louder groups.

In conclusion, using the Plan-Teach-Evaluate cycle has been very useful in order to come up with my best lesson, but it has also been extremely important to consider cognitive development as well as active learning and classroom management theories.

Lastly, I would like to make a self-reflection about my own approach to this project: I found it very interesting and I learned lots of new theories while researching the most effective ways to teach my lesson. However, since this is not the only summative assessment of this quarter, I once fell into the panic zone (Vygotsky) and it would have been useful if our books had presented a solution to this situation, rather than just a description. In fact, as a teacher, it will be my job in the near future to help students through this difficult situation and I would like to learn how. For me, personally, taking half a day off has been useful to restore my inner-peace, but I then found myself staying up all night to catch up with what I had not done in the afternoon, which is not the healthiest solution. Despite this episode, I did appreciate this project very much, because it gave me the opportunity to research and learn new theories that will always be useful to me as a teacher.