Micro-Teaching

The Micro-Teaching was an interesting and challenging experience. Some of the difficulties we had has to create a lesson plan for a class that we didn't really know. We knew the grade and the content they were reviewing; we also knew amount of students and the teacher mentioned some conduct problems. However, since we never saw the class ourselves, we didn't know how they were in real life, so we prepared a lesson plan with the information we had. We got feedback from the teacher to correct it, so we did.

When we got to the classroom, we had a problem with the laptop and the projector, so we had to improvise the first part of the class. Instead of showing the sentences with the projector I had to write them on the board, which took a little more time. The main problem for me was that I was too nervous that day. I was still sick, with a cough, and I felt eve more pressured when I started the class. I don't think I did that good of a job. It was really hard to control the classroom and get the students attention.  Some of them were more interested in following the class, other were less so, but were still listening, and finally, there were some that weren't interested and disrupted the class. This is clearly a display of my own lack of experience. Despite the difficulties the class had already, I couldn't get the class going the way I wanted it to. Although at some point I believed I got through to the students, it was really hard to keep their concentration on the lesson.

When I look back and I think of the content, it wasn't wrong, most of the students could understand the main idea of it, the problem was that most of them had a hard time understanding English. I tried my  best to explain everything without using Spanish, and sometimes I would use what a couple of the students who understood said for the rest to get what I was saying. I didn't want to use Spanish, because that was the instruction, but also because I had to be able to make myself understood only in English. I wasn't easy, and I think I could have done better. 

In the end, I think the most difficult part was to confront the class and try and show confidence. I didn't have the right attitude that day. I felt off for the most part of the class, but I tried to make it work and I tried to present the lesson that we prepared the best way possible. Nevertheless, the experience was great, and despite the shortcomings, I learned a lot from it. I have a lot of things that I still need to improve, and I really want to get better at this, I think that when I was there in the class I could really grasp the idea that working a class with young learner is really challenging and you have to make a really great effort. It really is harder and it takes much more from you, but I want to continue learning and improving myself so that when I have to face a class of my own, I can stand there with confidence and provide the best learning experience I can give.