My self-reflection  and self-assessment on the teaching experience in High-school El Joncar

From my point of view, there has been a positive improvement. In the past, I had given classes before and had experienced working with small groups and one-to-one classes. So when I first started my practicum, I probably had a whole different idea of what teaching a class of thirty students would be. When teaching one-to-one classes or small groups you tend to individualise learning a lot. Whilst when you teach big groups you have to adapt your whole teaching unit so that this one can be inclusive from the get-go. In addition, it has to take into account the diversity and inclusiveness that you will encounter while teaching.  Conversely, when I arrived at the first practicum I felt a little bit overwhelmed because I wanted to help all of the students as when I was giving one-to-one classes or teaching small groups but this help had to transform and I learned new strategies from my mentor Laura Vendrell during the second practicum.

The first practicum’s first week was an observation week so we got to learn some strategies that are really interesting and that allowed us to help students better. 

The first strategy was the placement of our students in the classroom. They were sitting in groups of four, so when they were set to work in cooperative groups of four I could move around and help each group in a more efficient way. During the first practicum maybe I stayed a little bit too long with one group of students when working on cooperative tasks. But I learned to help and move a little bit faster within the second practicum. I got to see the improvement as students were more satisfied and felt less stressed. I was caring and tried to help students that were struggling during the first and second practicum, this allowed me to create an environment of trust with my students so that they could feel comfortable asking questions. During the first practicum, they didn’t really know us so this shifted quite significantly during the second practicum. Sometimes students had a hard time understanding English, during the first practicum I had a hard time switching to Catalan or Spanish for clarification, but during the second practicum, I learned that clarification of instructions had to be done in Catalan or even when helping struggling students they felt a great sense of relief when I spoke to them in Catalan for clarifying some aspects of the task they were being set to do.

The second strategy I learned during the first practicum that I got to perfect during the second, was co-teaching methodology. This strategy can be really helpful to get to all students and make sure the teaching quality improves. It is based on supportive, parallel, and complementary team teaching. My practicum colleague Victor and I were really lucky to work together because we got to work very well. We complemented each other during classes and got to perfect this thanks to our mentor Laura Vendrell’s feedback as she watched us teach every day. I got to perfect communication and interpersonal skills with my colleague and the whole class of students during the second practicum. This improvement was majorly bettered thanks to the meetings we had at the end of each class where teamwork and collaboration allowed us to adapt and change classes so that they were perfected. For example, let’s say we had to repeat the same class in three different classes, let’s say this class was based around a Jigsaw reading, we would meet after the first session of the Jigsaw reading class, and we would discuss some improvements and proceeded to make some changes and implement them on the next day to the other group classes. This allowed our teaching to improve and evolve each time and by cooperatively discussing and finding new group strategies we could better our quality of teaching. Flexibility and adaptability were the key to success.

A third strategy that I learned in order to get all students' needs met and ensure that their ongoing learning experiences would be great and satisfactory was that organization and planning are the keys to a successful teaching and learning experience. We got to create a small mini-teaching unit during the first practicum. This mini-teaching unit was designed and taught by us, which allowed my practicum colleague and me to get to practice and have a more realistic view of time management. When planning some activities we were maybe a little bit too optimistic during the first practicum and thought that students would complete tasks quicker but in reality, this turned out to change and we had to adapt and organise better during the second practicum which in my opinion we got to better time management without a doubt. Knowing the groups also allowed us to have a better understanding of time management and how this could change within groups.

The fourth strategy that I got to learn and improve was class management. During the first practicum students didn’t know us very well and sometimes they had a hard time being quiet at the beginning of the lesson. We found a technique that was quite effective and that definitely allowed us to manage this aspect of the class much better. We counted from three to one and stood steady and still in front of the class. Students then understood that it was time to start and this is a method that really worked during the second practicum. Also in regards to classroom management, when a student wasn’t behaving in class we gave them two opportunities to behave, first alert, and on the second alert he had to write his name down on the “vés i apuntat” worksheet, a strategy of the school that controls disruptive behavior when a student has more than three “vés i apuntat”, their parents are called. This was part of the school’s PEC program that I found really useful.

The fifth strategy that I learned was that provably if students are engaged, the class will be a success. So when preparing classes we used some strategies to catch students attention. For example for “Meeting Anita a Girl from 1910” we created an imaginary time machine so that students could imagine themselves going back in time so that they could understand a bit better the story and situation that we were going to explain. These engagement techniques were learned along the way and provably we bettered them during the second practicum. Digital tools were also a really cool way of engaging students, we learned to use Mentimeter, Eddpuzzle, Drive, and Self-made videos and slides in order to attract students' engagement to our final task of sending a video to the UN WOMEN SUOMI organization. We learned that as teachers we are not only there to teach English but also to open our student's minds to critical thinking and acquire in the case of our unit citizenship, entrepreneurship, cultural awareness, digital and expression competencies.

Last, but not least, we learned some strategies for assessment. During the first practicum we had never used a rubric to evaluate before, we had never had to take into account a class of thirty students before. So thanks to our mentor’s advice, we manage to create an inclusive assessment that took into account all students. We had some students with learning difficulties such as dyslexic students, students with mild ID, ADHD, ASD, anxiety disorder…So this was a challenge for the assessment, we learned to adapt the criteria for these students so that they could work in cooperative groups, and during the final task, they received extra help from us and an adapted final task so that they complete the rubric’s objectives. These students didn’t feel excluded and could take part in all of the activities done in the class, so thanks to these strategies learned we could ensure equity.

My practicum one and two were definitely great and enriching personal experiences that I will keep with me forever and go back to them when in need of ideas or strategies to improve. Teaching is definitely an ongoing process and learning from your own experiences can allow you to move become a better teacher each and every day.