Hi all:) It was really the first time that I taught something English today. I was imaging about being a real a teacher until this day, because we have been doing some micro teachings to our classmates and we knew that this is not a real teaching experience. Today again this idea was proved. The class environment is very different. Your plans could be useless or could work very well. You cannot know this before coming to class. The teacher should think on lots of possibilities. There is no certain thing to say about what will happen. For instance, we thought that the students would understand the instructions clearly, but I saw that you should make lots of repetition. I observed lots of things in fact. This is only one of them.
:) we did the teaching with Canan and I am agree with her. The classroom environment is something very different. You think that you clearly explained everything but the students look at you and say 'ne yapcaz yani şimdi?'.Then you explain everything from the beginning and you have to have good paraphrasing skills, when they do not understand a word you should come up with a synonym. Timing is another thing that we had difficulty. Until now all of micro-teachings were prepared for our friends and they were doing the activities very fast. However, real students need much more time to be able to finish the tasks. You may suddenly hear the bell, when you still have uncompleted activities.
I think that, after you have tasted the enjoyable part of teaching, you can't give up being a teacher :) I have a claim that, in your first experience you can decide on whether you can be a qualified teacher or not,as you feel either as a part of the class,or you can't stand to be there. Namely, first impression leads us to true way in this teaching issue. So, were you able to give a decision about your future carrier after your first teaching task ? :)
I also did my teaching with Seda about two weeks ago and the students were curious about what was going to happen. Their teacher was sitting at the back in the classroom and we were on the stage. Some of the students wanted me to speak Turkish because they did get the instructions sometimes and I had to repeat them again and again. However, they did not do anything that gave me unrest during the teaching. They didn't make so much noise and I appreciated this attitude.
Hi, Yesterday I did my teaching with Fatih. The first part of the teaching was mine. It was my responsibility to keep the students silent at the beginning of the lesson;however, I could not feel myself ready to do so. The mentor teacher did this and and introduced me to the students. After doing so the students gave me moral claps. Although I felt nervous until that moment, from then on I felt really relaxed. The teaching part was quite good. The students helped me a lot. They participated in the lesson. They listened to my instructions and did whatever I asked. At the end of my teaching they clapped me again. The teaching was really enjoyable. I hope all my teaching life continues like this with such students.
As Özlem mentioned, we did our first teaching together. It was the first time I was teaching in a real classroom environemt.Before the teaching I was anxious because I thought that they may not listen to me. However the studetns were very helpful. They listended to me very carefully and tried to the things I ask them. For this I am grateful to the students. There were some problems during the teaching. The students had diffuculty in understanding the instructions as Özlem mentioned. I had to simplfy and repeat the instructions again and again. All in all it was really nice to work with students and try to teach them something. In my opinion teaching is enjoyable.
On Tuesday, in our practice teaching in Hasan Ali Yücel, we experience our first exam as a teacher. Being in the other side of the classroom, we weren't responsible for dealing with an exam as a student. In fact, it was very enjoyable, but the students were suffering from the exam :) Theexam seemed to be a bit difficult for the students level. I am looking forward to seeing the results:)
Hi, we did our practice teaching last week. We did it with Hilal and we divided the parts. I taught the lesson and she did the activities. It was really enjoyable. At first I was a bit nervous and excited. I couldn't decide how to begin to teach the lesson. However, after beginning, the rest came easily. My biggest concern was that if the students didn't participate, or if they found the lesson boring. Nevertheless, none of these were happened. On the contrary, some of the students came to us and said that they really enjoyed the lesson and they liked it. When I heard these words from the students, I was really happy. Before beginning our teaching in Ahmet Bahadır İlhan İlköğretim Okulu, I didn't want to become a teacher in a school. However, now I find it really enjoyable. I love my students, I love their happiness, so I can become a teacher when I graduate. Why not?
Hi all, I think you remember the research task that we interviewed with our mentor teacher about her teaching philosophy. One of our questions was about the students’ motivation. We asked her is there any strategy that she uses and how can a teacher motivates the students. I would like to share her answer. She thinks that if the students are attending to one of the successful schools in Turkey, being motivated is their duty. If a student doesn’t want to study, the teacher can’t do anything. She also adds that she tries to put on different and colourful cloth in this way she thinks that she can take the students’ attention. However, I think that getting their attention and motivating them are different from each other. In order to motivate the students, a teacher should try to make a student understand that s/he is valuable. The first step to achieve this is to learn their names. Another thing is to make the lesson useful for the students, in other words the teacher should try to explain way they need this lesson, what happens if they don’t learn anything, what are the pluses and minuses. Of course there are lots of things that can be done, what do you think about motivation? What can a teacher do to motivate the students?
Hi to all, This week our mentor teacher had something to do and we had to take care of the class. Although it was not a teaching task, she asked us to do the activity that she did in the previous class. Since we were helping the students in the previous hour, it was not so difficult. However there were some challenges. The activity was a writing task, So the students asked some questions related to vocabulary, I felt like I am not competent enough, but I think it will be a lot easier when I get used to teaching. What is the most importing is that we should keep studying and improving ourselves.
Also, we had to watch the students during the history exam, and we had an exam in the afternoon. It was a really different experince. In the morning you are a teacher and in the morning you are the student taking the exam. I believe this school experience help us transform more easily.
There is this difficulty also. I can't find time to fill the observation tasks!! Our mentor teacher wants us to be active during the classes, which is something good, but I need a solution. Do you have any suggestions?
Today to do the observation task 5 I observed one of the students from the beginning of the lesson to the end. It was so interesting. The student did so many things during the lesson like listening to the teacher, talking to his friends around and answering their questions. However, even if he talks to his friends during lesson he participated all the activities and completed all the exercises on time. I was just amazed at seeing his capacity to be so active both socially and academically in one lesson.
On Friday I did the observation task 3 and 4. I realized that a teacher should know the students level and ask questions accordingly. Low level students have diffuculty in answering the inference questions. They are good at answering direct questions. It is also useful to want them to answer the questions in pairs. When they work in pairs, more students raise their hands.While doing the task 4, I realized the importance of waiting time in the lesson. If a teacher cannot decide on well one the right waiting time the students remain very passive during the lesson. To increase the participation in the lesson, one way is the waiting time.
Hi Hatice, you said your mentor was asking you to do activities during the class and as I understand there are times that she isn't in the class. I think you really should talk to your mentor teacher and explain that there are observation tasks that you have to do during the lesson while she is lecturing. If this doesn't help, you may talk about this with Müge hoca.
I will do my first teaching tomorrow, but I'm not anxious. Actually I was more nervous while prepering my micro teachings. I don't agree with Canan in that we can't decide whether we are qualified teachers or not according to our first teaching.because the quality of our first teaching depends on many things. first of all we don't have experience yet, and we are not the actual authority in the class, so we may have classroom managemet problems and such things. ı will teach in 9A and the students are very attentive and I hope they will be attentive tomorrow, too. Wish me luck :)
To be honest, I felt a bit afraid when I saw some students who are indifferent to the lessons and the subjects. I remember one female student. Although she got many warnings from her teacher about not getting involved with other things during the lesson, she did what she wanted to do. Of course it is our job to attract them and treat them according to their needs but still I think it will not be easy to be neutral to all students.
Hi all, Yesterday we did teaching task 2. I can say that it was absolutely not good. We prepared the worksheet according to a reading book that the students should have read beforehand. And the teacher told them to read the book 2 weeks ago. However, there were only 3 students who had read the book. Actually we had foreseen this and prepared a summary to start with. Apart from this the students were very disrespectful; they didn't listen to us at all. They were always talking among themselves. They were not like this in our first teaching task and I was surprised. The lesson was just a disappointment for me and I felt very discouraged. I hope they don’t behave like this in the other teaching tasks.
Aslı, don't be discouraged. Probably they had an exam or something before your teaching or they were going to take one after it. We have learned how changeable students are:) One week they are the perfect students, the other week it's like torture to be in that class., We can find a way for ourselves. I don't know the level of your students but mine are 9th and 10th graders and they act upon their emotions:) So, don't take their attitudes personal. I wish you luck and motivated students for your next teaching:)
Hi friends, Yesterday I did my teaching task 2. It was again an exciting one for me. The students seemed to be accustomed to us more. It was both good and bad for us. As Aslı said the bad sides, the students didn't listen to us. They even didn't read the reader which their teacher gave as the homework. I had to spend much time only on the summary of the book. I asked comprehension questions on the book but they weren't interested in much about the book. They said that they had 5 6 exams in the week nowadays, so they didn't have a chance to look at it. However, even if we tried to give them the core of the book in the course, they made noise by talking about themselves. It was a hard day for me. After We left the school, we all had headache..
As Aslı and Canan mentioned we prepared he second teaching task together with Aslı Canan and Özlem. The teacher liked the worksheet we prepared. Aslı and Canan presented their part and we will present on Friday. There were some problems in the classroom. They had not read the story book on which we prepared our worksheet although it was a homework assigned by their teacher. Their excuse was that they had a lot of exams. Hopefully we had prepared a summary and they read it to do the activities. As Aslı mentioned they were very unwilling to take part in the lesson. They caused classroom management problems all the time. There are certain students who cause problems and when they sit together they really affect the effectiveness of lesson negatively. In order to prevent this, the teacher should change their sitting arrangement in my opinion, because the students at the back talk all the time during the lesson. The teacher should take these students to the front and change their desk mates.
Hi heiligenschein, thank you for your comments. As you said I understand that I shouldn't take this personal. But at first, right after the class, I wasn't thinking properly. Our students are in the 9th grade and they are starters. The lesson was the last two hours of the day and they had physics exam in the morning, this may be reason for their not being motivated. However, there are still some problems; they don't see us as the authority in the class. Many of the students call us as 'abla', they don't use the word teacher.
Hi everyone last week we did our firs teaching. At the beginning I was a little nervous but then I understand there is nothing to be nervous about. After the teaching I felt like a bird, it was hilarious. The mentor teacher has not said anything yet but I think I will be an enthusiastic teacher. So far so good, wish me luck.
Hi Aslı, I know you asked the question a few days ago, but I saw it now. You listed most of the motivation strategies :) However, I want to add another one. Maybe the teacher can select the student of the week or the month. Giving presents to those students also can be an option. I think, in young learners this type of motivation will be useful because for these learners the approval of their teacher is important.
Tomorrow we will do our second teaching task. As you know it is about preparing worksheets. At first I thought that it was easy. We just had to prepare some interesting questions for the students. However, the thing was that I didn't know preparing worksheets could be this hard. It was really tiring because we had to find appropriate questions according to the topic. Moreover, they should be interesting and enjoyable. They should be appropriate for the students' level, too. We had to find different type of exercises so that the students wouldn't be bored. We searched internet to find different ideas about how to prepare worksheets. Finally, we decided on beginning the lesson by telling a story with an origami (folding paper). After that I will ask some comprehension questions and then the students will form sentences from jumbled words. This is my part. Hilal, my peer, will make students listen to a music about the topic and will give them fill in the blanks activity about the song. Then she will want students to form questions by looking the given pictures. I think the lesson will be enjoyable, but I'm a bit nervous. I don't know what to do if the students are bored.
Hi all and especially Duygu:) First of all, after hearing about your talent in the first teaching,:) I am sure that you will do better, because always the firsts are the most difficult ones. You have seemed that you already managed to be a good teacher:) As far as I understand from what you have said about the lesson plan, tomorrow you will get the students attention easily. Neverheless, I wish you good luck with my heart as a survivor from the second teaching task on the previous Tuesday:D
Hi Canan :) In the first teaching task our mentor teacher said "what the important thing for me is to take the attention of the students and make them participate in the lesson. You have to use authentic materials in the class. You also have to make the students enjoy the lesson." Therefore, we tried to design a lesson according to his demands and tried to make students participate the lesson as much as we can :)I hope we can ensure the same success. Thank you very much for your nice wishes :)
I want also talk about our first “real” teaching with Duygu. First of all, I am agreeing with Canan in that preparing for this teaching was much more difficult than our-micro teachings. First reason of this that, in our micro teaching, we surely know that the students will understand our instructions and will finish the activity both in time and correctly. However, this time it was different! We doubted whether the students would understand the instructions, warnings or questions in English, as our teacher generally speaks Turkish in classroom when giving instructions or asking questions. We considered so much time to arrange timing and we did many rehearsals for teaching. In each time we get the idea that students will not understand what we will say and become worried. Then, we decided to give examples, repeat or rephrase what we mention to make them understand what we say.
Secondly, our teacher wanted us to find an authentic material and introduce it before giving the rules. I mean he wanted us to teach in an inductive way. Our topic was expressing dates with ordinal numbers and years. Thus, we worked a lot to find an authentic material related to ordinal numbers and years. Thanks to our hard work we finally formed a semi-authentic text and give it as a listening activity. While conducting the lesson, our ELT courses helped us very much. We used the techniques we learned from those courses. At first we both were a bit excited and feared if we could not take the attention of the students. However, our students listened us carefully and all of them wanted to participate in the activities. Thus, I was very happy to finish our first teaching successfully. Our students said us, “it was very enjoyable lesson” and we become much happier as the comments of the students were very important for us. Now, I want to mention a chance: Before the teaching task, students were not much interested in speaking with us. However, after the teaching, whenever they see us they are smiling, say “hello teacher” “how are you” etc. This proved that our teaching activity had a positive effect on them and we felt that we are the part of the teaching & learning atmosphere now.
Hi everyone next week we will do our second teaching is there anyone who wants to give some suggestion to me, of course from the ones who did their second teaching. Canan what about you?
Hi everyone and Osman, we did our second teaching today and I'd like to give you some suggestions. Firstly, you should know your students and their level very well. I mean you should prepare exercises which will not very hard or easy for them. Secondly, timing is very important, so you should take into account this while preparing the activities or during teaching. Good luck!
Hilal, it's good to see some positive comments here. I appreciate your hard work and it's great that you could build a good relationship with students. We don't experience such problems in Hasan Ali Yücel especially in one of the classes we are very welcomed. I remember when one of my partners was in charge of teaching, nobody wanted to participate in the speaking activity. Then, one of the students volunteered because he didn't want us to feel disappointed. This was very kind of him and I saw if we get cooperation of students we can have a good teaching atmosphere.
Last Wednesday I experienced my first teaching. It was good, I really enjoyed teaching. As I expected, the students were so attentive and respectful. They listened to me carefully and participated in lesson. I wanted the students to write their names on a paper and put it on the desk. Only one of them did not do what I say and during the listening activity he did not open his book. I said that I think you should open your book and he said nothing. Although he had the book he pretended to follow from his friend's book. I did not do anything. Then during the speaking activity he raised his hand and I became very happy. Before he began speaking I said "I don't know your name" then he introduced himself. I hope he understood why I wanted them to put their name on the desk. However, I think he is a good student, they are adolescences. Because of this sometimes we should tolerate some misbehaviors and we shouldn't take it personal.
I did the teaching task 2 with Özlem. Each of us had one class hour. After Thursday, I was anxious because the students were very unwilling to take part in the lessons recently as they have a lot of exam in the week. However, things were not as I feared. I did a listening activity and a game. The students really liked the game. They were really enthusiastic. In my teaching experience I noticed the positive effect of games and group work. During the teaching I also experienced the effect of teaching in the morning. The students are much more attentive in the morning than they are in the evening. Lastly; the most difficult thing in teaching is classroom management in my opinion. You can never guess what they will do next, how they will respond. Classroom is full of surprises.
Seda you have perfectly summarized the management issue: "Classroom is full of surprises." :) Every studnet has their own ideas and perspectives and expectations from the teacher and the english lesson. So, being able to respond all the needs and expectations is not possible. What we need is cooperation of the students.
thank you heiligenschein; you are completely right ,too. We really need student cooperation of the students in a lesson. Otherwise everything turn out to be meaningless.
As Seda mentioned, on Friday we did our second teaching. During my teaching, one of the students asked me the difference between "die" and "dead" and I got really happy. They were interested in the lesson and they were thinking about the new vocabulary items. I tried to explain the difference and I think they got the meaning. While teaching, as a teacher you want to see the reaction of the students when they ask only one question it shows that they are concentrating on the lesson. As a teacher, to experience it is priceless.
Hale, thank you firstly. It is also good to see that you welcomed by your students. I realized that there is a relation between the love of teacher and love of lesson. Interesting and attractive activities make students more interested in the lesson. Therefore, they love your lesson and you.
Hi everyone, I did my first teaching with Hale and Emine, As opposed to what Hilal says the preparation part was very easy for us, because our Mentor teacher wanted us to use the book. So we didn2t have to find activities and materials and so on. Now I appreciate the books, because it reaaly helps teacher and saves a lot of time. This experience make me see the things that we cover in FLE 405 in real life.
Hi everyone, Today we applied a quiz to the class. It was about the book that they have read. There were three parts; listening, vocabulary and writing. Most of the students had a hard time on listening part because actually they don’t have listening activities in class. This was the second time for them. The first listening they did was in our second teaching task. I think they can do better after some exercises. As we all know, practice makes perfect. They just need time and lots of activities.
Hello friends, As Aslı mentioned today we experienced our first quiz and its calculation. I want to refer to the calculation process:)It was the first time that we calculated an exam. We had to think on the different point of views of the students' answers. We had to be fair to all students. I see that it is an important issue. You should decide on whether you will be tolerant to the spelling mistakes or not. Some of the students grades made us suprised. In the future, when we become a real teacher, some of the silent students' grades can make us amazed :)
Canan, I want to ask a question to you. You mentioned the spelling mistakes. How did you decided on which spelling mistakes can be tolerated and which ones cannot?
Hatice, you are right the course books are really good sources for the teachers and time-savers. However, if the course book is not sufficient for teaching the lesson or lacks of activities, we should bring our materials to classroom. Our course book is also like the one I mentioned. Thus, our teacher especially wanted us not to use the coursebook, bring other enjoyable and instructive materials. I think even if the preparation was a difficult process for us, we learned many useful things. I hope in schools, teachers -not MEB- select their own coursebooks and the teaching process would be much efficient :)
Tomorrow, we will do our second teaching and I really have doubts on how it will be because we will be teaching body parts and as you know our students are fourth grade so they don't know English much and this is a new topic for them. But we have just 40 minutes for the present, practice and produce stages of this vocabulary teaching and this will also include teaching has got/hasn't got as grammar point and I am not sure whether we can manage this in just fourty minutes and while we all (four people) will be presenting. It may be a bit difficult to understand for the students but we will try to make it easy. I hope we will manage this teaching successfully.
As Hatice mentioned, during our teaching coursebook was our guide. To be honest, I think we were lucky because the coursebook used in HAYAL is applicable in the class. For Materials Course, I am working on one of the books published by MEB and it is nothing but a problem:) The activities are almost the same and ineffective.
Hı all Firstly thank you Hilal for your sugesstions. Today we did our second teaching it was quite good (as our mentor teacher said) we were better then before, I mean there was improvement. We didn’t use the course book, we prepared everything ourselves and our worksheet was quite challenging. So everything is fine so far ı just wanted to share with you, my friends.
Aslı, I am really surprised to learn that your students don't have listening activities in the class, because we are going to the same school. Our mentor teacher always works on skills including listening and she presents grammar and vocabulary via these skills. Same school but different approaches to teaching. We see how a teacher's philosophy affects her teaching:)
We did our second teaching this week and our teacher liked it much more than needed:) Even if she finds us really good, I don't feel so good because I really had problems in putting my voice to right tone. I felt as if I had been on a stage so I couldn't be sure about whether the students hear me or not and this is a bit weird:) Even if I feel not as good as our mentor teacher about my teaching, the students like the lessons we teach because they had fun and they don't care about making mistakes and their grades:)
Hi Hilal; Thank you for asking me such a question, because it is an important issue for us as especially because of being not much experienced teachers.In my opinion, the errors that don't disturb the meaning of the sentence can be accepted as true. This can be letter mistakes, or letters that are forgotten.These are not big problems I think. However, if the student really doesn't know how to spell the vocabulary item that was taught in the class a few time, then this shows that he has not been interested in the course much. This can be a clue and we can have a judgement according to these situations. If any friends have another idea about it, please share them with us to gain different point of views:)
Yesterday, I realized that the students really made progress and I became very happy. At the beginning of the term they couldn’t’ speak; actually they were not trying to speak. But yesterday, one of the 9 graders made a correct relative clause sentence although they did not learn it. They read story books and the T speaks English all time. These inputs caused them acquire one of the hardest topic of English without realizing it. I realized that our mentor teacher is really doing her job successfully. Some of the reasons behind her success is that she attends ELT conferences at METU, she searches for new methods, but the most important one is she LOVES her job
Canan, about the error corrections, I think we should never ignore the spelling mistakes and accept them as true, which could lead to fossilization, but we should give constructive and corrective feedback.However I do not think that we should penalize the studetns for making spelling mistakes everytime. I think if a teacher gives the students impression that it is okay to make mistakes while learning and the teachers are there for them to help throughout the process, the students do not get intimidated by error corrections and see them as a part of learning process.
I think that error correction mainly depends on classroom culture. In the beginning of the term and if you are new to the students you have no chance but to use direct correction. However after getting to know eachother and teacher and students can build up their own unspoken language. Mimics, gestures take the place of explicit correction. This time teacher can use elicitation or pralinguistic signalling in an effective way.
Hi everyone and Hatice; I am mostly talking about the exams. In the exam you can be more tolerable to small spelling mistakes in my opinion. Then you can focus these mistakes after the exam in the classroom and warn them about their mistakes, because the reasons of all mistakes don^'t lead to fossilization. It might be because of the stress or writing fast during the exam. I want to look at this point more tolerable not to demotivate the students because they always talk about the exams after the exams:)even if they are not interested in the course itself.
Last week we did a quiz to the students. This was my first exam experience. We prepared a quiz related to the story we taught in the classroom. I understood that teaching is really much more easier than testing. Especially grading is hard job in writing parts.
Yes Emine that was really interesting. I remember that at the beggining of the semester one of the stduents said "hocam Türkçe konuşsanız anlamıyorum" and the same student actually talked in English last week to express himself. May be Krashen was rigth about i+1 exposure;)
I see your point Canan,but I still think that we should correct the mistakes but not deduce points unless it is not a spelling test in order not to discourage students
Hi everyone, about correcting the mistakes, I think that the minor spelling mistakes can be tolerated as long as showing the right one to the students. For the errors which show us that the students don't know the structure properly, we should diminish their points. For example, if a student use the perfect tense structure "have written" as "have writen" there is no need to take points. However if s/he writes it as "have eated" we may give the student a half point as s/he didn't forget writing "have" at least:)
I think speaking English in the lessons as long as possible is really important. It develops students' grammar, vocabulary, listening and indirectly their speaking skills. For example, teacher uses "imperatives", "classroom objects", "simple tense" and many other language structures which students did not learn explicitly. However, even if they haven't been taught before, they begins to understand these usages in the process of time and such kind of knowledge is much more permanent as they are given in a meaningful context.
I think a teacher should not refrain using English in class for the fear that students will not understand him. At least he should give the instructions in English and make his students get used to this atmosphere. For example, before we start our lesson, we feared that our students will not understand the instructions or sentences in English. However, we see that with some effort, they can understand what you mean. Naturally, sometimes they cannot understand you, but for such times, the teacher can give some clues, show some items, use his gestures or mimics and later turn to Turkish for a short time.
Hatice, I've just read your comment and I agree with you. The teaching style changes from teacher to teacher not from school to school. Our mentor teacher is going to start using the Q-skills book next week. Until now she used the MEB book which is not an efficient book as we all know. However that's her preference and we have nothing to say to her. Today we did another listening. This time it was a song 'Englishman in New York'. The students had really enjoyed the song and tried to do the activity. I think they are getting used to it, thanks to the student teachers :)
Today our mentor teacher did not attend the class and we did the lesson. We did a listening activity in the class. They listened to a song and filled in the blanks. The song was English man in New york by Sting.The studetns liked the song. When we were listening for the last time they also sang the song. We taught them some vocabulary items as pre listening activity with the use of ppt. As post listening activity they did a vocabulary fill in the blanks activity. Then we did some grammar exercise in order to help them with the exam.
Aslı, you have mentioned your mentor teacher used MEB Book. I feel sorry not only for the teacher and for the studnets:) I did my adaptation on a unit from a book published and written by MEB and it was not an adaptation but a rewriting:) I don't know whether she showed any effort to adapt it or not but even after makşng some changes, it is not possible to have a good English lesson. I think it is a perfect idea to cahnge the book.
Hi Canan; I'm sorry but I don't agree with you in terms of students' spelling mistakes. When a student cannot spell a word properly, I think it doesn't mean that he is not interested in the lesson. In English there are words that are really difficult to write. Therefore, s/he can forget the written form of them. Thus, what I'm trying to say is that even if a student really like learning English, she/he still may not write some of the vocabulary items properly. Apart from this, spelling problems may occur because maybe students are in a hurry. I mean It is an exam and the students have to complete it in given time. Moreover, even us make such errors because we are in a hurry :) Therefore,I think we have to think this before giving grades :)
I agree with Hilal about speaking English in the classroom environment. I think we have to speak in English while teaching the lesson because classroom is the only environment that students can take proper input. Our students don't have a chance to practice their English out of the classroom. If we don't speak in English with them, where do they learn to speak it? We shouldn't think that "what am I going to do, if they don't understand when I speak in English." With pictures, gestures and some body language, I'm sure that they will understand what we try to tell. However, I have some doubts about teaching grammar in English. I don't know how we can teach,for example, present perfect tense or if clauses without using Turkish. Any idea?
As Seda mentioned, yesterday we did an extra teaching and the teacher did not come to the class at all. At first the students asked us questions related to where their teacher was but we also didn't know where she really was. She just said to us that she wouldn't come. She also wanted us to take the attendance but as students teachers we didn't have that responsibility and therefore we rejected taking the attendance. The lesson was smooth and the kids didn't create a problematic situation during the lesson. All in all, even if it was tiring day because of this late-announced teaching task, we managed to enjoy ourselves with the song together with the students.
Hi friends! Özlem, Aslı and Seda, you have the same mentor teacher, right? I have some questions: Did you prepare the listening song, activity sheet and ppt including vocabulary? Or did your mentor teacher give you such materials and want you to do so? Did s/he make you aware about his/her absence before coming to the class, the day before or did you learn it when you already went there?
I think this kind of demands are not ver useful for us. We aren't the teachers of that class so if something bad happens, we will be responsible for this automatically. Giving us the whole responsibility of the class while the real teacher is away is wrong. However, you and your group managed it perfectly Özlem. Congratulations :)
Yes, Hilal we prepared all these materials by ourselves in a day because she announced that to us with certainty only one day before. She said about her absence three days before but she said that "maybe she wouldn't come to the class" and that "maybe" at that time meant that it had a low possibility. Also, she wanted us to be silent in case the head master realized her absence. We tried to do our best in the lesson but that event made me very upset and angry during the day. I can say that I do not trust our mentor teacher at all from now on. She just thought of her own "small profits" in a way and tried to make us work in an illegal way. However, we didn't let her make use of us for her those tricks.
Thank you, Duygu for your praise. As you said, she gave us the responsibility that we mustn't take. We are just students and we are there just to learn!! something from her. However, she took our presence as an advantage and made us work for her.
Özlem, how could she think of exploiting you in this way? I would understand if she asked you to prepare another lesson to make you practice a little bit more but obviously this is not ethic. Our mentor teacher does everything to help us. I really like her. Her enthusiasm, love of teaching, energy and determination regardless of the official issues :) makes me feel sympathy towards her. I think it is more than a practicum for you :) You are getting used to meeting with such people.
Yes, Hale unfortunately we faced such an attitude. Lucky you that you like your mentor teacher and you are content with her behaviors towards. All in all, there are just a few weeks to finish the practicum. We will try to forget it and will just focus on the students.
Hi everyone, We did our third teaching yesterday. We taught the difference the between S. Past and P. Perfect. We used salty cracker and chocolate to be able to teach the subject. They ate the cracker first and then the chocolate. The taste of the cracker was S.past as they had the taste of chocolate in their mouth which is P.Pefect. While I was giving the chocolate, one of the sts said “Öğretmen olunca ben de böyle yapacağım”. I was very proud that she liked our technique and took us as role models. I see that if you are a teacher, everyday you experience different things to talk about.
Our mentor teacher is a good teacher as I said before. However, yesterday she did a listening activity in 10 graders. It was a good activity; but she projected the transcript of the text while listening. So, the sts read the transcript instead of listening as they were expected. We should be very careful about this to be able to achieve the objectives.
Emine at first I thought just like you, but then I realized that she was doing that in order to do the pronunciation practice. So I think there was no problem with her technique.
Emine I think your idea and your way of teaching are really nice. Giving chocolate and salty cracer to teach the tenses is very creative and I like it very much. It is an example for us. Thank you for your sharing :)
Hi friends:) we are about to completing our schoool experince for the first semester.I wonder about the fact tha in which ways this experience has effected you? Do you think this semester has reached its aims? I also wonder about your feelings about being a teacher. Is there anoyone who has changed her decision about being or not to being a teacher after all:)
Hi Canan, I think this semester was really useful for us. We didn't attend a real classroom environment before. We did our teachings in our classes and they were easy because our students were our classmates. Therefore, we didn't have to think about if the students could understand our instructions or vocabulary items in the given texs or if the exercises were too difficult for them, if they were above their level etc. Morever, we didn't have to deal with classroom management issues and we didn't have any problem about it. However, now we have to deal with real students and real problems that occured during our teaching. This semester we learned how to overcome these problems and we also learned about classroom management. We learn to adjust our voice, use our gestures and mimics, preparing worksheets, preparing lesson plans and teaching lessons. Therefore, I think that yes this semester was useful for us. Before starting our practical training in the schools, I didn't want to become a teacher. However, when I saw the students attitudes towards us and when I experienced teaching something to the students, I began to love teaching. Thus, now I think why not? Why don't I become a teacher? :) And what about you Canan. What do you think?
Hi, I did my Teaching Task 2 last week. As you all know, I needed to prepare aich is hard worksheet. I had to prepare something on comoparative adjectives. As for the material preparation, it was a really hard procedure for me. First of all, it was very difficult to prepare a material which is hard enough to use with B2 level students. After getting some feedback from the mentor teacher, I finally managed to prepare something appropriate for students. As for teaching procedure, there occurred another problem. The mentor teacjher said that she could only allocate 10 minutes for my teaching. So, I could not do all the exercises that I had prepared in the classroom. Despite all of these things, my teaching-I think- was very good. In my first teeaching, I had felt very nervous. In this second teaching experience -despite having very limited time- I did my best.
I want to share something about our mentor teacher. Actually she is a very professional teacher although she is not very experienced (her forth year in teaching). She has very good use of English and she seems to have got a good pedagogical education. She is very good at doing her job, dealing with the students, managing the classroom. On the other hand, she is such a strict teacher. Some of the students in the class are naughty, and when they misbehave the teacher reacts very harshly. Sometimes we (I and Osman) find her right for her attitude because sometimes students really exaggerate. But sometimes we don’t stand thinking that actually the one who exaggerates is the teacher herself. There is not a friendly relationship between the students and the teacher. And we have an impression that students do not like their teacher very much. I often think that she mustn’t be so strict and should have a friendly relationship with her students. But I don’t have any idea about what I would do if I was in her place.
I want to answer Canan's question about effectivness of pracicum. It helped me be realistic:) Last semester I did my practicum in high school in Balgat. When I compare these two schools, there is a huge difference since the English proficiency changed dramatically. In that school I was dealing with "the meaning of weekend" or some basic grammar rules such as using "am" with first singular person. Here, they may not be talking fluently but the school culture, student quality encouraged me. I may want to work in HAYAL if I choose MEB.
Hi friends! Emine, your way of teaching simple past tense and perfect tense is really interesting and effective one. I also like that idea. Congratulations! :)
Ersin, I think every teacher has their teaching and management style, so I don't think that she would chance this behaviour easily. With the passing of time, when she learn about her students more,she may be more tolerant to them.
Hi friends :) Duygu, I cannot agree with you more than that:) We found the opportunity of appling what we have learnt for four years. We could see the real atmosphere of a classroom. I really realized that being a teacher is my job. I believe that I won't be regretful if I work as a teacher in the future. I haven't decided on the level or the age of the students that I work with most yet. After this experience, I can see that our lives and characters will shape according to our occupations. I have started to behave like a teacher in my real life, in my room in the dormitory for instance. I want to be a helper or a teacher to one of my friends repeating the preparatory class. I can say teaching is a real delight :)
Canan, you are absolutely right in saying that "teaching is a real delight" but at the same time it is such a difficult responsibility. You may be the only model in front of your studnets. So, you have to be careful not to mislead them. I hope we can all manage to be good teachers, guides, friends, advisors of our students...
Canan, at first, I had doubts about teaching, beacuse I was not sure whther I willl be successful or not. However after our teachings in practicum, I realized that I have the necessary skills and I can do it. Actulally, I enjoyed teaching while doing the teaching task 3. Now I can not wait to start teaching I can say that:)
Today the teacher asked the students to hand in their term projects. But only two students had their assignments ready with them. In fact, almost all of the students in the class are very bright and hard working. So, when I saw there were only two students handing in their assignments, I was surprised. As we know very well from our own experience, 9th grade is one of the most difficult years in one’s student life. They do not study only one of science, math, literature and English. They study all of them in detail. They enter very hard exams, and they submit lots of assignments. I think the work load is too heavy for those students. After studying English in detail in the prep year, that much homework is not necessary in the 9th grade, I think. I do not help pitying those students. This educational sytem does not let students live their chilhood.
I see that someone says “teaching is a real delight” this is true to some degree but unless, we as prospective teachers, are discouraged. Yes, I’m implying that I was discouraged because of our mentor teacher’s inconvenient remarks about us. And in those last days I’m seeing that neither the teacher is enthusiastic to teach something nor the students are willing to learn something, and this is not what I was imagining about the collage, the teacher and the students. I don’t know what kind of a teacher ı will be, but ı know what kind of a teacher ı won’t.
Dear Hial and Duygu, frist of all because of some technical problems between this blog and me, I couldn’t respond you earlier. Thanks for your praising about teaching S.past and P. Perfect. But it was actually Hale’s idea not mine. But we are a team Hale, Hatice and me. So I can accept your praise, anyway thank you.
Canan, this course is very useful for us. As Duygu said, we had chance to apply what we have learned during 3.5 years. Teaching is more than knowing theories and methods perfectly. Without teaching English, without being in a real classroom, something will always be missing. But still I have some doubts whether I want to teach English or not. I cannot answer this question until I have my own classroom because the relationship between the students/other teachers at school and us is not so real. They don’t see us as real teachers, and the other teachers may sometimes assume that we are the student of that school. For example last week I was in the teachers’ WC and one of the teacher overreacted me, then she realized that I’m not student and she apologized. The only positive thing about this event is that it means I’m looking younger : )
I agree with my friends who wrote about the usefulness of this course. As you said, theory and practice are completely different from each other. Since we were not educated with the techniques and approaches that we are learning at university, putting that theory into practice is no easy thing for us. Theory and practice must be given equal importance, but unfortunately university education in Turkey involves very little practice. The number of internship courses should be increased. Starting with the second grade, students should start to familiarize with the field that they are going to work in, as in the case of Europe. This will bring solution to many problems regarding the efficiency of vocational education. Also it will be a great contribution to the work force of the country.
Hi all We are getting closer to the end. It is exiting isn’t it? I think we did a good job, I mean the whole class. I wish the next term will be easier and more fruitful. Emine states that the teachers don’t see us as real teachers. Actually they are right to a degree, because we are so young and we have a lot to learn. And maybe there will come a time in which we will be mentor teacher and we will have student teachers to whom we will be more helpful.
Ersin, You might be right about increasing the number of training courses, but I think that would not change much, because everything is artificial during this training. And I believe that a teacher can not be a fully competent teacher unles he or she has their own classes.
Actully I agree with Hatice. This practicum term is not real enough to help us experince school environment and teaching.However, still it works. At least we see and observe the atmosphere. The length may be cahnged and we can be called as asistants. So that we can feel the real responsility.
You are right about your claims. Those teaching practices are a bit artificial, and student teachers are not given full responsibility. As I wrote in my previous comment,I think, if the practice courses begin at the second grade,this artificiality will decrease towards the last grade, and our mentors will feel more free to give us more responsibility. Also, we will have chance to see how theory can be put into practice more effectively. We all learn lots of theoretical things in the 2nd and 3rd grade, but never see them in practice, and then we just forget all of them. Maybe, putting that knowledge into practice can make it permanent.
Ersin, it is really different to teach in an environment that you are observed by other teachers.I must say that I really feel nervous when I am observed and I can not show my potential and I can not "live" the lesson. Yesterday,our mentor teacher instructed us what to do and gave the responsibilty of some of the students. For, one group I taught some of the things they did not know and we did the activities together. It was REALLY enjoyable. They asked questions and wanted to me repat the things thay did not understand. I got the taste of teaching. But, many of the mentor teachers do not do that. So, I still stand behind what I said. I do not think that more artificial practice will help us. What should we do is that we should choose mentor teachers very carefully. Also, I know that some of the universities appoint someone for the trainee teacher they supervise and help them for their first year of teaching and they also provide them with in-service training. I believe that is more helpful. You have your own class and also you have someone to consult with. In theory, Ministiry of National Education has this kind of implementation. You are not a "full" teacher, as far as I know, unless you complete 2 years of teaching and during this period you should have a mentor, but this can not be put into practice, allegedly we do not have enough teachers. Shortly, first of all, we should put this implementation into practice in my opininon.
Hi everyone! We are about to finish our teachings, so I also want to talk about this course. I think this course is really a useful one, so I agree with Ersin that the number of practice teaching lessons should be increased. For example, we can start observing from the 3rd grade. Up to this year, we haven’t experienced the teaching in a real class. We did our micro-teachings, everything was artificial but they were also very helpful to improve ourselves. This year we have a chance to make lesson in a real classroom and school environment. We really have to consider carefully about instructions, materials, lesson plan etc. Our mentor teacher is a really nice man, so he doesn’t make us feel nervous. His demands from us were really logical like authentic materials and colorful activities which will attract students’ attention. He hasn’t criticized us harshly or discouraged us. I think all the mentor teachers shouldn’t discourage student teachers from teaching. Instead, they should be model for us and affect us positively. As our teacher was calm, we were also calm while teaching. Yes, sometimes we were very excited, but it is very normal I think. Besides, he left all the responsibility to us during the lesson. So I haven’t felt artificiality but felt like I am the real teacher of the class.
Today I did the teaching task 3. I used the coursebook by adapting it.During the lesson, I got disaoopinted at some points because the students were very active but not interested in the lesson. I tried to give the instructions but they did not listen to me. I had to shout at some points to be heard.However the mentor teacher sa,d that I was unnecassarily stressed because there was not that much noise. She said that ın general I was good. The teacher said that today was friday and they were tired after five days' work.
Apart from the classroom experiences, we also have experienced the extracurricular ones. We have not only met real students, but also school principal, teachers, canteen keeper etc. as a teacher. We have greeted many teachers, sit with them in a teachers’ room and had a conversation as a teacher. Therefore, such kind of experiences gave us many ideas about being a teacher. For example, I really liked the idea of being in a school as a teacher. If I haven’t experienced such a thing, I may not consider being a teacher. I have even talked with an assistant principle about being a principle and this also gave me some ideas. In contrast to this, some other student teachers may don’t like teaching or school environment, so this will be an idea for them to become a teacher or not in the future. If we haven’t experienced such a thing, we might be late for taking some decisions.
Heiligenschein, I also feel sorry like you because the book is really not effective for communicative language teaching, apart from this it doesn’t provide authentic materials. The teacher doesn’t make any adaptation at all. However she sometimes changes the activities places and passes the pronunciation parts. I observe that the students get bored during the lessons. Fortunately last week she started using the book, Q-Skills. It is obviously a better book than the New Bridge. However, there is again a problem. As they started from the first unit and they had already done the same topics with the MEB book, Q-skills is too easy for the students now. They already know the vocabulary and the grammar being thought in the book. The new things are only the activities.
I also did my teaching task 3 on Friday. I was sick with the flu and I had problems in using my voice during the lesson. After all, in my activities the students were active and in some points the kids just got engaged in that I just let t go because I saw that they were enjoying themselves. They clapped their hands and laughed much and I got happy with them. The activities aimed at making a rehearsal of the grammar and therefore I saw that it was unnecessary to be so much serious and I also enjoyed myself.
Hi friends and Özlem; Thank you for your answers to my question. I have learnt you opinion about the course and being a teacher. Congratulations Özlem. I could not manage to be relax enough when I was teaching something. In fact, I would be relax if there was not a teacher observing you :)I believe that most of these teachings did not reflect the real teacher inside us, because being the only power in the class changes most of the thing. I am not comfortable enough for some reasons although I am generally comfortable in communicating people in the real life. I hope I will be better about this point in my last teaching with Müge Hoca.
I also had a chance to have a look at the coursebook that is prepared by MEB and is used by public schools. it is 8 graders' book. Probably many of us are familiar with that book "spot on". If my memory is not wrong, the name of the book was same when we were at 8th grade. The level of the book is a bit upper for primary school children. I wonder if students can really understand that book. All of the skills are equally covered. In contrast to the lessons at public schools, it is not grammar based. Units are constructed around a particular topic, and the coursebook is kept student centered as much as possible. It seemed like a good book to me. Even if it has some major problems most important of which is authenticity of the language. The texts do not reflect the real life usage of language. It is very obvious that they are written by Turkish speaking people.
Today, I did my last teaching :) I was good to take informative and useful feedbacks from Müge hoca. I am braver now to be a teacher than before :) On Thursday, we will go to school for the last time. Today I looked at the class and felt that I would miss them because they are our first students. I want to take a photo of them to remember them all the time as my firsts. As usual it is dramatic for me to leave somewhere or someone :) I hope it will be a nice semester for both me, my friends and the students in HAYAL.
Hi friends, last week we did our third teaching. Hilal and I separated the parts as before. Our topic was "since" and "for" usage. Hilal taught the topic and I did the acitvity part. It was really enjoyable for me and for the students. In the activity, students played a board game. I divided the class into two groups and they raced with each other. The students were really cheerful and they participated the activity willingly. This made me happy because I had thought that maybe they didn't want to participate the activity. However, it was quite the opposite. This gave me confidance about teahcing. I hope my activity in the final teaching will be as enjoyable as this one.
Hi friends :) Because it's almost the end of the semester, I will make an overall evaluation about this course and my practicing teacher experience. For the course I can say that this course is one of the courses thorough which I have developed myself. I think the reason for this is that we had a chance to practice what we have learnt in the methodological courses we have taken so far in a real classroom environment and we all have realized how much it is different to teach students there. I mean, although during the micro teachings, everything is under control, we have seen this is not possible when we are teaching in the classrooms. For example, almost all of us are complaining about time management. I can’t understand how long a presentation takes 15 minutes during the teaching while it takes just 5 minutes when we practice it over and over again before the teaching. Then, we have seen that students may not understand the thing we say even if we explain it again and again. Moreover, we have witnessed that sometimes we may be unable to answer to the students’ questions or we may have to change our lesson plans due to the inadequate equipment of the school or unexpected breakdowns. Apart from the chance this course gives us to experience the real classrooms; I also like the tasks given. I think these tasks made us aware of many things we didn’t realize before. They made us to analyze the behaviors of our mentor teachers and understand the rationale behind them. Also, they helped us to create our own teaching philosophy. When it comes to my practicing teaching experience, I have also faced almost all the situations I mentioned above in adapting to a real classroom and they helped me to improve myself. Moreover, my mentor teacher is very professional as she has been teaching 15 years, so while I was observing him, I have learnt some effective techniques to achieve classroom management, time management and to handle with breakdowns and problematic students in the classroom. Also, I have learnt a variety of enjoying activities that can be easily applied in classrooms. With the feedbacks she gave me after teachings, I have seen the points that I must pay attention to. Furthermore, I haven’t lived any difficulty with the equipments or with the administration because ODTÜ Koleji is a well-equipped and disciplined school.
Hi, everyone Today was our last day at school. Our mentor teacher allocated the last hour for us, she said that we could say a goodbye to the students. The students also said their thoughts about us. It was nice to hear their ideas and how they reacted to us. They generally said good things, one of the students said that he didn't like us at the first two weeks or so but then he got used to us and started enjoying our lessons. The students also mentioned that we were very anxious at our first teaching task, and they were right. Later on as they got used to us we also got used to the classroom atmosphere and the students. Our mentor teacher also thanked us for being respectful and responsible; she gave us a little present. I really got embarrassed because we hadn't thought about buying a present to her. All in all, this was n effective and also enjoyable practicum for me.
This week, I did my last teaching and I completed all ten weeks for the practicum. Despite the problems we had and the hard work we did for the weeks to finish the lessons was a bit difficult. There were some students that I talked to in the break time and I really liked learning about their life at the school and their ideas related to the English lessons and other lessons. Also, we did about ten observation tasks during the term and I realized that the students also observed us more than we did. One of the students who sits on the front side said that our hands were shaking at our first teaching. To sum up, practicum provided me different experiences related to teaching and I realized that that experience with real students in a real classroom cannot be got in any other circumstance.
Hi everyone, On Friday I did my final teaching. Before the final teaching, I assumed that I don’t like teaching and I do not want to be a teacher. I was a bit desperate about my job. But, in final teaching I really enjoyed teaching, I saw that I really like the students .I realized that if the teacher taught willingly, if she liked the students and what she did, she wouldn’t get older. Because the students are so energetic and they give positive energy to others. Although they are tired, they are away from their parents and they have so many courses to study; they are still happy and they smile all the time. One becomes happy when she looks at them. While doing my final teaching, they really helped me by participating actively and at the end of the course they gave clap to us and one of the sts said “Thanks to teachers like you, we love English”. Nothing could make me happier than this sentence that they. During the break time we went to their classes to say good bye. When we entered the class again they applauded us. I was both surprised and affected because they did not reveal that they love us before.
Hi everyone, On firday I did my last teaching with Emine and Hale. I realized that I was not excited at all.As you understand from what I wrote so far, I did not believe that practice teaching would not prove so useful, but I realizd that I was wrong, because the first day that I entered the class I was so nervous, but in time that was gone and I am very confident in myself now. Also, the love of students is great,even within this short period of time, we had a connection and on the last day I was very emotional. One student said to my mentor " hocam masallah bütün stajyerleri özenle seçmiş gibisiniz hepsi çok iyiler."It felt really good to hear that:)I will do my best to be a succesful teacher, because nothing can be compared to see that your students learn from you. Just an advice to those who has not done their final teachings yet, forget about the fact that you are being observed and enjoy teaching, then I believe your final teaching will be quite good.
Waoww I cannot believe that school experince course came to an end:) As Hatice said, I was also thinking that this course was not helpful at all but now I realize I got used to the idea of being a teacher. The school and our mentor teacher helped us a lot. Havva Hoca encouraged us through the way and gave us advises and some clues:) Final teaching went better than I expected. Müge Hoca was also understanging and thoughtful. She paid attention not to disturb us during the lesson. I can say sometimes I forgot her existence in the class. I really enjoyed being an intern in Hayal.
Hi everyone, This week I completed my teaching task 3. It was great. Let me explain why it was great. I planned to do a debate on body art in the classroom. When I showed my lesson plan to my mentor teacher, she said that this was a good plan but difficult to administer. I felt a little bit disappointed; however, I was really willing to do this activity in the classroom. Finally the teaching day came. I was really excited. Everything went well in my teaching. At the end of the lesson, I felt really happy that the teacher was not right=)
I noticed that all friends who completed their final teaching are quite satisfied with the lessons they taught. Most of us seem to be becoming aware of that we will be teachers when we graduate, and the general impression about teaching seems to be changing. When we first came to that school, majority of our classmates did not want to be teachers. There was a negative impression about teaching. Many people were saying that teaching is the last job that I want to do. But when we come to the last year of university, many of us are planning to choose some kind of teaching career. Is it possiblly because our school changed our views about teaching, or are there other reasons?
Hi friends; Yesterday We didn't go to our schools for the fisrt time after a long period. It lasted 10 weeks, we went there twenty times. Nevertheless, When I look back on, I think that I didn't get bored going and teaching there. I hope not only our days, weeks but also our years will spend nicely as a teacher. Last week was a good experience for me. The students and the teacher behaved us very well. The students added us via facebook and said that they loved us after the time passed. I told my friend in the group that what a difficult thing to chance a school for a teacher who is accustomed to teaching there. It was really short time for us but I felt what a teacher feels when he/she leaves a school where she spends lots of time.
I really wonder whether being a teacher in high school or in primary school is better. Actually, in the second term, I want to be in a primary school because the children seems to me more open to learn but I have to learn how is the teaching like in high school. I was really happy in my school this semester, I hope you will have chance to work with our mentor teacher. I think we have many things to learn from her in terms of teacher-student relations.
Most of us finished their final teaching and everybody seems contended. The ones who don't want to be teacher changed their mind with this practicum. This is great! I also find this practicum very useful as I mentioned before. This term, we went a state school and observed the students and teaching atmosphere there. In the second term, I want to go to private school to have an experience there, too. I wonder the differences betwen them and the atmosphere of the schools.
Hi everybody Everybody who has done their final teaching will understands how happy I’m because of doing my final teaching. During our three teaching it was a little exciting but when Müge Hoca was there it was much more exciting. In spite of some small problems it wasn’t bad I think. When I think about how much improvement we have experiencing during this whole term, I’m sure after the second term we all will be quite bright teachers. I wish everybody will have a good holiday.
As Osman said, we also did our final teaching. I cant say everything went fine. We had a technical problem at the beginning of the lesson. So we could not do our listening activity which we thought students would like very much. Because of that problem at the beginning of the lesson, our morale collapsed and it effected the rest of the lesson. But Müge Hoca was very understanding. She said she would not blame us for the problem and she would not cut any point for it. But none of us is concerned with problems or points. We are just concerned with the relief of getting rid of the burdens on us.
Everyone who have gone to state school this semester wants to have an experience in a private school next semester but I am not sure about that. Private schools always seemed scary to me but anyway I have to face with my fears:)
I really agree with Hila. I wonder the atmosphere of different schools. This semester I was in a state high school. I want to be in a primary school certainly and want to work with young leraners. Besides this, I want to be in a private school in order to see the difference. While deciding on where to work, this will help us a lot in my opinion.
I was at a private school this semester and I can say that it is no scary thing at all. I can even claim that teaching at a private school is definitely easier and more enjoyable.Because students already know a good deal of English and they are mostly eager to learn more English. When you speak English, they do not look at you with blank eyes, they immediately understand you and react accordingly. As they are all selected and bright students, we did not have any difficulty in teaching English to them. But on the other hand, you are expected to do your best at a private school. When we did our first teaching, we were thinking that we had a good performance. But when I saw my grade I was a bit schocked, because it was lower than I expected. I think if I had taught the same lesson at a public school, most probably my grade would have been better.
Hi all:)
YanıtlaSilIt was really the first time that I taught something English today. I was imaging about being a real a teacher until this day, because we have been doing some micro teachings to our classmates and we knew that this is not a real teaching experience. Today again this idea was proved. The class environment is very different. Your plans could be useless or could work very well. You cannot know this before coming to class. The teacher should think on lots of possibilities. There is no certain thing to say about what will happen. For instance, we thought that the students would understand the instructions clearly, but I saw that you should make lots of repetition. I observed lots of things in fact. This is only one of them.
:)
YanıtlaSilwe did the teaching with Canan and I am agree with her. The classroom environment is something very different. You think that you clearly explained everything but the students look at you and say 'ne yapcaz yani şimdi?'.Then you explain everything from the beginning and you have to have good paraphrasing skills, when they do not understand a word you should come up with a synonym. Timing is another thing that we had difficulty. Until now all of micro-teachings were prepared for our friends and they were doing the activities very fast. However, real students need much more time to be able to finish the tasks. You may suddenly hear the bell, when you still have uncompleted activities.
I think that, after you have tasted the enjoyable part of teaching, you can't give up being a teacher :)
YanıtlaSilI have a claim that, in your first experience you can decide on whether you can be a qualified teacher or not,as you feel either as a part of the class,or you can't stand to be there. Namely, first impression leads us to true way in this teaching issue.
So, were you able to give a decision about your future carrier after your first teaching task ? :)
I also did my teaching with Seda about two weeks ago and the students were curious about what was going to happen. Their teacher was sitting at the back in the classroom and we were on the stage. Some of the students wanted me to speak Turkish because they did get the instructions sometimes and I had to repeat them again and again. However, they did not do anything that gave me unrest during the teaching. They didn't make so much noise and I appreciated this attitude.
YanıtlaSilHi,
YanıtlaSilYesterday I did my teaching with Fatih. The first part of the teaching was mine. It was my responsibility to keep the students silent at the beginning of the lesson;however, I could not feel myself ready to do so. The mentor teacher did this and and introduced me to the students. After doing so the students gave me moral claps. Although I felt nervous until that moment, from then on I felt really relaxed. The teaching part was quite good. The students helped me a lot. They participated in the lesson. They listened to my instructions and did whatever I asked. At the end of my teaching they clapped me again. The teaching was really enjoyable. I hope all my teaching life continues like this with such students.
As Özlem mentioned, we did our first teaching together. It was the first time I was teaching in a real classroom environemt.Before the teaching I was anxious because I thought that they may not listen to me. However the studetns were very helpful. They listended to me very carefully and tried to the things I ask them. For this I am grateful to the students. There were some problems during the teaching. The students had diffuculty in understanding the instructions as Özlem mentioned. I had to simplfy and repeat the instructions again and again. All in all it was really nice to work with students and try to teach them something. In my opinion teaching is enjoyable.
YanıtlaSilOn Tuesday, in our practice teaching in Hasan Ali Yücel, we experience our first exam as a teacher. Being in the other side of the classroom, we weren't responsible for dealing with an exam as a student. In fact, it was very enjoyable, but the students were suffering from the exam :) Theexam seemed to be a bit difficult for the students level. I am looking forward to seeing the results:)
YanıtlaSilHi, we did our practice teaching last week. We did it with Hilal and we divided the parts. I taught the lesson and she did the activities. It was really enjoyable. At first I was a bit nervous and excited. I couldn't decide how to begin to teach the lesson. However, after beginning, the rest came easily. My biggest concern was that if the students didn't participate, or if they found the lesson boring. Nevertheless, none of these were happened. On the contrary, some of the students came to us and said that they really enjoyed the lesson and they liked it. When I heard these words from the students, I was really happy. Before beginning our teaching in Ahmet Bahadır İlhan İlköğretim Okulu, I didn't want to become a teacher in a school. However, now I find it really enjoyable. I love my students, I love their happiness, so I can become a teacher when I graduate. Why not?
YanıtlaSilHi all,
YanıtlaSilI think you remember the research task that we interviewed with our mentor teacher about her teaching philosophy. One of our questions was about the students’ motivation. We asked her is there any strategy that she uses and how can a teacher motivates the students. I would like to share her answer. She thinks that if the students are attending to one of the successful schools in Turkey, being motivated is their duty. If a student doesn’t want to study, the teacher can’t do anything. She also adds that she tries to put on different and colourful cloth in this way she thinks that she can take the students’ attention. However, I think that getting their attention and motivating them are different from each other. In order to motivate the students, a teacher should try to make a student understand that s/he is valuable. The first step to achieve this is to learn their names. Another thing is to make the lesson useful for the students, in other words the teacher should try to explain way they need this lesson, what happens if they don’t learn anything, what are the pluses and minuses. Of course there are lots of things that can be done, what do you think about motivation? What can a teacher do to motivate the students?
Hi to all,
YanıtlaSilThis week our mentor teacher had something to do and we had to take care of the class. Although it was not a teaching task, she asked us to do the activity that she did in the previous class. Since we were helping the students in the previous hour, it was not so difficult. However there were some challenges. The activity was a writing task, So the students asked some questions related to vocabulary, I felt like I am not competent enough, but I think it will be a lot easier when I get used to teaching. What is the most importing is that we should keep studying and improving ourselves.
Also, we had to watch the students during the history exam, and we had an exam in the afternoon. It was a really different experince. In the morning you are a teacher and in the morning you are the student taking the exam. I believe this school experience help us transform more easily.
YanıtlaSilThere is this difficulty also. I can't find time to fill the observation tasks!! Our mentor teacher wants us to be active during the classes, which is something good, but I need a solution. Do you have any suggestions?
YanıtlaSilToday to do the observation task 5 I observed one of the students from the beginning of the lesson to the end. It was so interesting. The student did so many things during the lesson like listening to the teacher, talking to his friends around and answering their questions. However, even if he talks to his friends during lesson he participated all the activities and completed all the exercises on time. I was just amazed at seeing his capacity to be so active both socially and academically in one lesson.
YanıtlaSilOn Friday I did the observation task 3 and 4. I realized that a teacher should know the students level and ask questions accordingly. Low level students have diffuculty in answering the inference questions. They are good at answering direct questions. It is also useful to want them to answer the questions in pairs. When they work in pairs, more students raise their hands.While doing the task 4, I realized the importance of waiting time in the lesson. If a teacher cannot decide on well one the right waiting time the students remain very passive during the lesson. To increase the participation in the lesson, one way is the waiting time.
YanıtlaSilHi Hatice,
YanıtlaSilyou said your mentor was asking you to do activities during the class and as I understand there are times that she isn't in the class. I think you really should talk to your mentor teacher and explain that there are observation tasks that you have to do during the lesson while she is lecturing. If this doesn't help, you may talk about this with Müge hoca.
Thanks Aslı. I should absoulutely do that :)
YanıtlaSilHi all,
YanıtlaSilI will do my first teaching tomorrow, but I'm not anxious. Actually I was more nervous while prepering my micro teachings. I don't agree with Canan in that we can't decide whether we are qualified teachers or not according to our first teaching.because the quality of our first teaching depends on many things. first of all we don't have experience yet, and we are not the actual authority in the class, so we may have classroom managemet problems and such things.
ı will teach in 9A and the students are very attentive and I hope they will be attentive tomorrow, too. Wish me luck :)
To be honest, I felt a bit afraid when I saw some students who are indifferent to the lessons and the subjects. I remember one female student. Although she got many warnings from her teacher about not getting involved with other things during the lesson, she did what she wanted to do. Of course it is our job to attract them and treat them according to their needs but still I think it will not be easy to be neutral to all students.
YanıtlaSilEmine, I hope you will have a great teaching experince. I think 9/A is the best class of the classes we attend.
YanıtlaSilGood luck Emine:)
YanıtlaSilHi all,
YanıtlaSilYesterday we did teaching task 2. I can say that it was absolutely not good. We prepared the worksheet according to a reading book that the students should have read beforehand. And the teacher told them to read the book 2 weeks ago. However, there were only 3 students who had read the book. Actually we had foreseen this and prepared a summary to start with. Apart from this the students were very disrespectful; they didn't listen to us at all. They were always talking among themselves. They were not like this in our first teaching task and I was surprised. The lesson was just a disappointment for me and I felt very discouraged. I hope they don’t behave like this in the other teaching tasks.
Aslı, don't be discouraged. Probably they had an exam or something before your teaching or they were going to take one after it. We have learned how changeable students are:) One week they are the perfect students, the other week it's like torture to be in that class., We can find a way for ourselves.
YanıtlaSilI don't know the level of your students but mine are 9th and 10th graders and they act upon their emotions:) So, don't take their attitudes personal. I wish you luck and motivated students for your next teaching:)
Hi friends,
YanıtlaSilYesterday I did my teaching task 2. It was again an exciting one for me. The students seemed to be accustomed to us more. It was both good and bad for us. As Aslı said the bad sides, the students didn't listen to us. They even didn't read the reader which their teacher gave as the homework. I had to spend much time only on the summary of the book. I asked comprehension questions on the book but they weren't interested in much about the book. They said that they had 5 6 exams in the week nowadays, so they didn't have a chance to look at it. However, even if we tried to give them the core of the book in the course, they made noise by talking about themselves. It was a hard day for me. After We left the school, we all had headache..
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YanıtlaSilAs Aslı and Canan mentioned we prepared he second teaching task together with Aslı Canan and Özlem. The teacher liked the worksheet we prepared. Aslı and Canan presented their part and we will present on Friday. There were some problems in the classroom. They had not read the story book on which we prepared our worksheet although it was a homework assigned by their teacher. Their excuse was that they had a lot of exams. Hopefully we had prepared a summary and they read it to do the activities. As Aslı mentioned they were very unwilling to take part in the lesson. They caused classroom management problems all the time. There are certain students who cause problems and when they sit together they really affect the effectiveness of lesson negatively. In order to prevent this, the teacher should change their sitting arrangement in my opinion, because the students at the back talk all the time during the lesson. The teacher should take these students to the front and change their desk mates.
YanıtlaSilHi heiligenschein,
YanıtlaSilthank you for your comments. As you said I understand that I shouldn't take this personal. But at first, right after the class, I wasn't thinking properly. Our students are in the 9th grade and they are starters. The lesson was the last two hours of the day and they had physics exam in the morning, this may be reason for their not being motivated. However, there are still some problems; they don't see us as the authority in the class. Many of the students call us as 'abla', they don't use the word teacher.
Hi everyone last week we did our firs teaching. At the beginning I was a little nervous but then I understand there is nothing to be nervous about. After the teaching I felt like a bird, it was hilarious. The mentor teacher has not said anything yet but I think I will be an enthusiastic teacher. So far so good, wish me luck.
YanıtlaSilHi Aslı, I know you asked the question a few days ago, but I saw it now. You listed most of the motivation strategies :) However, I want to add another one. Maybe the teacher can select the student of the week or the month. Giving presents to those students also can be an option. I think, in young learners this type of motivation will be useful because for these learners the approval of their teacher is important.
YanıtlaSilTomorrow we will do our second teaching task. As you know it is about preparing worksheets. At first I thought that it was easy. We just had to prepare some interesting questions for the students. However, the thing was that I didn't know preparing worksheets could be this hard. It was really tiring because we had to find appropriate questions according to the topic. Moreover, they should be interesting and enjoyable. They should be appropriate for the students' level, too. We had to find different type of exercises so that the students wouldn't be bored. We searched internet to find different ideas about how to prepare worksheets. Finally, we decided on beginning the lesson by telling a story with an origami (folding paper). After that I will ask some comprehension questions and then the students will form sentences from jumbled words. This is my part. Hilal, my peer, will make students listen to a music about the topic and will give them fill in the blanks activity about the song. Then she will want students to form questions by looking the given pictures. I think the lesson will be enjoyable, but I'm a bit nervous. I don't know what to do if the students are bored.
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YanıtlaSilHi all and especially Duygu:)
YanıtlaSilFirst of all, after hearing about your talent in the first teaching,:) I am sure that you will do better, because always the firsts are the most difficult ones. You have seemed that you already managed to be a good teacher:)
As far as I understand from what you have said about the lesson plan, tomorrow you will get the students attention easily. Neverheless, I wish you good luck with my heart as a survivor from the second teaching task on the previous Tuesday:D
Hi Canan :) In the first teaching task our mentor teacher said "what the important thing for me is to take the attention of the students and make them participate in the lesson. You have to use authentic materials in the class. You also have to make the students enjoy the lesson." Therefore, we tried to design a lesson according to his demands and tried to make students participate the lesson as much as we can :)I hope we can ensure the same success. Thank you very much for your nice wishes :)
YanıtlaSilI want also talk about our first “real” teaching with Duygu. First of all, I am agreeing with Canan in that preparing for this teaching was much more difficult than our-micro teachings. First reason of this that, in our micro teaching, we surely know that the students will understand our instructions and will finish the activity both in time and correctly. However, this time it was different! We doubted whether the students would understand the instructions, warnings or questions in English, as our teacher generally speaks Turkish in classroom when giving instructions or asking questions. We considered so much time to arrange timing and we did many rehearsals for teaching. In each time we get the idea that students will not understand what we will say and become worried. Then, we decided to give examples, repeat or rephrase what we mention to make them understand what we say.
YanıtlaSilSecondly, our teacher wanted us to find an authentic material and introduce it before giving the rules. I mean he wanted us to teach in an inductive way. Our topic was expressing dates with ordinal numbers and years. Thus, we worked a lot to find an authentic material related to ordinal numbers and years. Thanks to our hard work we finally formed a semi-authentic text and give it as a listening activity. While conducting the lesson, our ELT courses helped us very much. We used the techniques we learned from those courses. At first we both were a bit excited and feared if we could not take the attention of the students. However, our students listened us carefully and all of them wanted to participate in the activities. Thus, I was very happy to finish our first teaching successfully. Our students said us, “it was very enjoyable lesson” and we become much happier as the comments of the students were very important for us. Now, I want to mention a chance: Before the teaching task, students were not much interested in speaking with us. However, after the teaching, whenever they see us they are smiling, say “hello teacher” “how are you” etc. This proved that our teaching activity had a positive effect on them and we felt that we are the part of the teaching & learning atmosphere now.
YanıtlaSilHi everyone next week we will do our second teaching is there anyone who wants to give some suggestion to me, of course from the ones who did their second teaching. Canan what about you?
YanıtlaSilHi everyone and Osman, we did our second teaching today and I'd like to give you some suggestions. Firstly, you should know your students and their level very well. I mean you should prepare exercises which will not very hard or easy for them. Secondly, timing is very important, so you should take into account this while preparing the activities or during teaching. Good luck!
YanıtlaSilHilal, it's good to see some positive comments here. I appreciate your hard work and it's great that you could build a good relationship with students. We don't experience such problems in Hasan Ali Yücel especially in one of the classes we are very welcomed. I remember when one of my partners was in charge of teaching, nobody wanted to participate in the speaking activity. Then, one of the students volunteered because he didn't want us to feel disappointed. This was very kind of him and I saw if we get cooperation of students we can have a good teaching atmosphere.
YanıtlaSilLast Wednesday I experienced my first teaching. It was good, I really enjoyed teaching. As I expected, the students were so attentive and respectful. They listened to me carefully and participated in lesson. I wanted the students to write their names on a paper and put it on the desk. Only one of them did not do what I say and during the listening activity he did not open his book. I said that I think you should open your book and he said nothing. Although he had the book he pretended to follow from his friend's book. I did not do anything. Then during the speaking activity he raised his hand and I became very happy. Before he began speaking I said "I don't know your name" then he introduced himself. I hope he understood why I wanted them to put their name on the desk. However, I think he is a good student, they are adolescences. Because of this sometimes we should tolerate some misbehaviors and we shouldn't take it personal.
YanıtlaSilI did the teaching task 2 with Özlem. Each of us had one class hour. After Thursday, I was anxious because the students were very unwilling to take part in the lessons recently as they have a lot of exam in the week. However, things were not as I feared. I did a listening activity and a game. The students really liked the game. They were really enthusiastic. In my teaching experience I noticed the positive effect of games and group work. During the teaching I also experienced the effect of teaching in the morning. The students are much more attentive in the morning than they are in the evening. Lastly; the most difficult thing in teaching is classroom management in my opinion. You can never guess what they will do next, how they will respond. Classroom is full of surprises.
YanıtlaSilSeda you have perfectly summarized the management issue: "Classroom is full of surprises." :) Every studnet has their own ideas and perspectives and expectations from the teacher and the english lesson. So, being able to respond all the needs and expectations is not possible. What we need is cooperation of the students.
YanıtlaSilthank you heiligenschein; you are completely right ,too. We really need student cooperation of the students in a lesson. Otherwise everything turn out to be meaningless.
YanıtlaSilAs Seda mentioned, on Friday we did our second teaching. During my teaching, one of the students asked me the difference between "die" and "dead" and I got really happy. They were interested in the lesson and they were thinking about the new vocabulary items. I tried to explain the difference and I think they got the meaning. While teaching, as a teacher you want to see the reaction of the students when they ask only one question it shows that they are concentrating on the lesson. As a teacher, to experience it is priceless.
YanıtlaSilHale, thank you firstly. It is also good to see that you welcomed by your students. I realized that there is a relation between the love of teacher and love of lesson. Interesting and attractive activities make students more interested in the lesson. Therefore, they love your lesson and you.
YanıtlaSilHi everyone,
YanıtlaSilI did my first teaching with Hale and Emine, As opposed to what Hilal says the preparation part was very easy for us, because our Mentor teacher wanted us to use the book. So we didn2t have to find activities and materials and so on. Now I appreciate the books, because it reaaly helps teacher and saves a lot of time. This experience make me see the things that we cover in FLE 405 in real life.
Hi everyone,
YanıtlaSilToday we applied a quiz to the class. It was about the book that they have read. There were three parts; listening, vocabulary and writing. Most of the students had a hard time on listening part because actually they don’t have listening activities in class. This was the second time for them. The first listening they did was in our second teaching task. I think they can do better after some exercises. As we all know, practice makes perfect. They just need time and lots of activities.
Hello friends,
YanıtlaSilAs Aslı mentioned today we experienced our first quiz and its calculation. I want to refer to the calculation process:)It was the first time that we calculated an exam. We had to think on the different point of views of the students' answers. We had to be fair to all students. I see that it is an important issue. You should decide on whether you will be tolerant to the spelling mistakes or not. Some of the students grades made us suprised. In the future, when we become a real teacher, some of the silent students' grades can make us amazed :)
Canan, I want to ask a question to you. You mentioned the spelling mistakes. How did you decided on which spelling mistakes can be tolerated and which ones cannot?
YanıtlaSilHatice, you are right the course books are really good sources for the teachers and time-savers. However, if the course book is not sufficient for teaching the lesson or lacks of activities, we should bring our materials to classroom. Our course book is also like the one I mentioned. Thus, our teacher especially wanted us not to use the coursebook, bring other enjoyable and instructive materials. I think even if the preparation was a difficult process for us, we learned many useful things. I hope in schools, teachers -not MEB- select their own coursebooks and the teaching process would be much efficient :)
YanıtlaSilTomorrow, we will do our second teaching and I really have doubts on how it will be because we will be teaching body parts and as you know our students are fourth grade so they don't know English much and this is a new topic for them. But we have just 40 minutes for the present, practice and produce stages of this vocabulary teaching and this will also include teaching has got/hasn't got as grammar point and I am not sure whether we can manage this in just fourty minutes and while we all (four people) will be presenting. It may be a bit difficult to understand for the students but we will try to make it easy. I hope we will manage this teaching successfully.
YanıtlaSilAs Hatice mentioned, during our teaching coursebook was our guide. To be honest, I think we were lucky because the coursebook used in HAYAL is applicable in the class. For Materials Course, I am working on one of the books published by MEB and it is nothing but a problem:) The activities are almost the same and ineffective.
YanıtlaSilHı all
YanıtlaSilFirstly thank you Hilal for your sugesstions.
Today we did our second teaching it was quite good (as our mentor teacher said) we were better then before, I mean there was improvement. We didn’t use the course book, we prepared everything ourselves and our worksheet was quite challenging. So everything is fine so far ı just wanted to share with you, my friends.
Aslı, I am really surprised to learn that your students don't have listening activities in the class, because we are going to the same school. Our mentor teacher always works on skills including listening and she presents grammar and vocabulary via these skills. Same school but different approaches to teaching. We see how a teacher's philosophy affects her teaching:)
YanıtlaSilI agree with you Hilal. I forgot about effect of the quality of the book because what we have in hand is quite good:)
YanıtlaSilHi,
YanıtlaSilWe did our second teaching this week and our teacher liked it much more than needed:)
Even if she finds us really good, I don't feel so good because I really had problems in putting my voice to right tone. I felt as if I had been on a stage so I couldn't be sure about whether the students hear me or not and this is a bit weird:)
Even if I feel not as good as our mentor teacher about my teaching, the students like the lessons we teach because they had fun and they don't care about making mistakes and their grades:)
Actually, they feel at home:)
Hi Hilal;
YanıtlaSilThank you for asking me such a question, because it is an important issue for us as especially because of being not much experienced teachers.In my opinion, the errors that don't disturb the meaning of the sentence can be accepted as true. This can be letter mistakes, or letters that are forgotten.These are not big problems I think. However, if the student really doesn't know how to spell the vocabulary item that was taught in the class a few time, then this shows that he has not been interested in the course much. This can be a clue and we can have a judgement according to these situations.
If any friends have another idea about it, please share them with us to gain different point of views:)
Yesterday, I realized that the students really made progress and I became very happy. At the beginning of the term they couldn’t’ speak; actually they were not trying to speak. But yesterday, one of the 9 graders made a correct relative clause sentence although they did not learn it. They read story books and the T speaks English all time. These inputs caused them acquire one of the hardest topic of English without realizing it. I realized that our mentor teacher is really doing her job successfully. Some of the reasons behind her success is that she attends ELT conferences at METU, she searches for new methods, but the most important one is she LOVES her job
YanıtlaSilCanan, about the error corrections, I think we should never ignore the spelling mistakes and accept them as true, which could lead to fossilization, but we should give constructive and corrective feedback.However I do not think that we should penalize the studetns for making spelling mistakes everytime. I think if a teacher gives the students impression that it is okay to make mistakes while learning and the teachers are there for them to help throughout the process, the students do not get intimidated by error corrections and see them as a part of learning process.
YanıtlaSilI think that error correction mainly depends on classroom culture. In the beginning of the term and if you are new to the students you have no chance but to use direct correction. However after getting to know eachother and teacher and students can build up their own unspoken language. Mimics, gestures take the place of explicit correction. This time teacher can use elicitation or pralinguistic signalling in an effective way.
YanıtlaSilHi everyone and Hatice;
YanıtlaSilI am mostly talking about the exams. In the exam you can be more tolerable to small spelling mistakes in my opinion. Then you can focus these mistakes after the exam in the classroom and warn them about their mistakes, because the reasons of all mistakes don^'t lead to fossilization. It might be because of the stress or writing fast during the exam. I want to look at this point more tolerable not to demotivate the students because they always talk about the exams after the exams:)even if they are not interested in the course itself.
Last week we did a quiz to the students. This was my first exam experience. We prepared a quiz related to the story we taught in the classroom. I understood that teaching is really much more easier than testing. Especially grading is hard job in writing parts.
YanıtlaSilYes Emine that was really interesting. I remember that at the beggining of the semester one of the stduents said "hocam Türkçe konuşsanız anlamıyorum" and the same student actually talked in English last week to express himself. May be Krashen was rigth about i+1 exposure;)
YanıtlaSilI see your point Canan,but I still think that we should correct the mistakes but not deduce points unless it is not a spelling test in order not to discourage students
YanıtlaSilHi everyone, about correcting the mistakes, I think that the minor spelling mistakes can be tolerated as long as showing the right one to the students. For the errors which show us that the students don't know the structure properly, we should diminish their points. For example, if a student use the perfect tense structure "have written" as "have writen" there is no need to take points. However if s/he writes it as "have eated" we may give the student a half point as s/he didn't forget writing "have" at least:)
YanıtlaSilI think speaking English in the lessons as long as possible is really important. It develops students' grammar, vocabulary, listening and indirectly their speaking skills. For example, teacher uses "imperatives", "classroom objects", "simple tense" and many other language structures which students did not learn explicitly. However, even if they haven't been taught before, they begins to understand these usages in the process of time and such kind of knowledge is much more permanent as they are given in a meaningful context.
YanıtlaSilI think a teacher should not refrain using English in class for the fear that students will not understand him. At least he should give the instructions in English and make his students get used to this atmosphere. For example, before we start our lesson, we feared that our students will not understand the instructions or sentences in English. However, we see that with some effort, they can understand what you mean. Naturally, sometimes they cannot understand you, but for such times, the teacher can give some clues, show some items, use his gestures or mimics and later turn to Turkish for a short time.
Hatice, I've just read your comment and I agree with you. The teaching style changes from teacher to teacher not from school to school. Our mentor teacher is going to start using the Q-skills book next week. Until now she used the MEB book which is not an efficient book as we all know. However that's her preference and we have nothing to say to her. Today we did another listening. This time it was a song 'Englishman in New York'. The students had really enjoyed the song and tried to do the activity. I think they are getting used to it, thanks to the student teachers :)
YanıtlaSilToday our mentor teacher did not attend the class and we did the lesson. We did a listening activity in the class. They listened to a song and filled in the blanks. The song was English man in New york by Sting.The studetns liked the song. When we were listening for the last time they also sang the song. We taught them some vocabulary items as pre listening activity with the use of ppt. As post listening activity they did a vocabulary fill in the blanks activity. Then we did some grammar exercise in order to help them with the exam.
YanıtlaSilAslı, you have mentioned your mentor teacher used MEB Book. I feel sorry not only for the teacher and for the studnets:) I did my adaptation on a unit from a book published and written by MEB and it was not an adaptation but a rewriting:) I don't know whether she showed any effort to adapt it or not but even after makşng some changes, it is not possible to have a good English lesson. I think it is a perfect idea to cahnge the book.
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YanıtlaSilHi Canan;
YanıtlaSilI'm sorry but I don't agree with you in terms of students' spelling mistakes. When a student cannot spell a word properly, I think it doesn't mean that he is not interested in the lesson. In English there are words that are really difficult to write. Therefore, s/he can forget the written form of them. Thus, what I'm trying to say is that even if a student really like learning English, she/he still may not write some of the vocabulary items properly. Apart from this, spelling problems may occur because maybe students are in a hurry. I mean It is an exam and the students have to complete it in given time. Moreover, even us make such errors because we are in a hurry :) Therefore,I think we have to think this before giving grades :)
I agree with Hilal about speaking English in the classroom environment. I think we have to speak in English while teaching the lesson because classroom is the only environment that students can take proper input. Our students don't have a chance to practice their English out of the classroom. If we don't speak in English with them, where do they learn to speak it? We shouldn't think that "what am I going to do, if they don't understand when I speak in English." With pictures, gestures and some body language, I'm sure that they will understand what we try to tell. However, I have some doubts about teaching grammar in English. I don't know how we can teach,for example, present perfect tense or if clauses without using Turkish. Any idea?
YanıtlaSilAs Seda mentioned, yesterday we did an extra teaching and the teacher did not come to the class at all. At first the students asked us questions related to where their teacher was but we also didn't know where she really was. She just said to us that she wouldn't come. She also wanted us to take the attendance but as students teachers we didn't have that responsibility and therefore we rejected taking the attendance. The lesson was smooth and the kids didn't create a problematic situation during the lesson. All in all, even if it was tiring day because of this late-announced teaching task, we managed to enjoy ourselves with the song together with the students.
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YanıtlaSilHi friends!
YanıtlaSilÖzlem, Aslı and Seda, you have the same mentor teacher, right? I have some questions: Did you prepare the listening song, activity sheet and ppt including vocabulary? Or did your mentor teacher give you such materials and want you to do so? Did s/he make you aware about his/her absence before coming to the class, the day before or did you learn it when you already went there?
I think this kind of demands are not ver useful for us. We aren't the teachers of that class so if something bad happens, we will be responsible for this automatically. Giving us the whole responsibility of the class while the real teacher is away is wrong. However, you and your group managed it perfectly Özlem. Congratulations :)
YanıtlaSilYes, Hilal we prepared all these materials by ourselves in a day because she announced that to us with certainty only one day before. She said about her absence three days before but she said that "maybe she wouldn't come to the class" and that "maybe" at that time meant that it had a low possibility. Also, she wanted us to be silent in case the head master realized her absence. We tried to do our best in the lesson but that event made me very upset and angry during the day. I can say that I do not trust our mentor teacher at all from now on. She just thought of her own "small profits" in a way and tried to make us work in an illegal way. However, we didn't let her make use of us for her those tricks.
YanıtlaSilThank you, Duygu for your praise. As you said, she gave us the responsibility that we mustn't take. We are just students and we are there just to learn!! something from her. However, she took our presence as an advantage and made us work for her.
YanıtlaSilÖzlem, how could she think of exploiting you in this way? I would understand if she asked you to prepare another lesson to make you practice a little bit more but obviously this is not ethic. Our mentor teacher does everything to help us. I really like her. Her enthusiasm, love of teaching, energy and determination regardless of the official issues :) makes me feel sympathy towards her. I think it is more than a practicum for you :) You are getting used to meeting with such people.
YanıtlaSilYes, Hale unfortunately we faced such an attitude. Lucky you that you like your mentor teacher and you are content with her behaviors towards. All in all, there are just a few weeks to finish the practicum. We will try to forget it and will just focus on the students.
YanıtlaSilHi everyone,
YanıtlaSilWe did our third teaching yesterday. We taught the difference the between S. Past and P. Perfect. We used salty cracker and chocolate to be able to teach the subject. They ate the cracker first and then the chocolate. The taste of the cracker was S.past as they had the taste of chocolate in their mouth which is P.Pefect. While I was giving the chocolate, one of the sts said “Öğretmen olunca ben de böyle yapacağım”. I was very proud that she liked our technique and took us as role models. I see that if you are a teacher, everyday you experience different things to talk about.
Our mentor teacher is a good teacher as I said before. However, yesterday she did a listening activity in 10 graders. It was a good activity; but she projected the transcript of the text while listening. So, the sts read the transcript instead of listening as they were expected. We should be very careful about this to be able to achieve the objectives.
YanıtlaSilEmine at first I thought just like you, but then I realized that she was doing that in order to do the pronunciation practice. So I think there was no problem with her technique.
YanıtlaSilEmine I think your idea and your way of teaching are really nice. Giving chocolate and salty cracer to teach the tenses is very creative and I like it very much. It is an example for us. Thank you for your sharing :)
YanıtlaSilHi friends:)
YanıtlaSilwe are about to completing our schoool experince for the first semester.I wonder about the fact tha in which ways this experience has effected you? Do you think this semester has reached its aims? I also wonder about your feelings about being a teacher. Is there anoyone who has changed her decision about being or not to being a teacher after all:)
Hi Canan,
YanıtlaSilI think this semester was really useful for us. We didn't attend a real classroom environment before. We did our teachings in our classes and they were easy because our students were our classmates. Therefore, we didn't have to think about if the students could understand our instructions or vocabulary items in the given texs or if the exercises were too difficult for them, if they were above their level etc. Morever, we didn't have to deal with classroom management issues and we didn't have any problem about it. However, now we have to deal with real students and real problems that occured during our teaching. This semester we learned how to overcome these problems and we also learned about classroom management. We learn to adjust our voice, use our gestures and mimics, preparing worksheets, preparing lesson plans and teaching lessons. Therefore, I think that yes this semester was useful for us. Before starting our practical training in the schools, I didn't want to become a teacher. However, when I saw the students attitudes towards us and when I experienced teaching something to the students, I began to love teaching. Thus, now I think why not? Why don't I become a teacher? :) And what about you Canan. What do you think?
Hi,
YanıtlaSilI did my Teaching Task 2 last week. As you all know, I needed to prepare aich is hard worksheet. I had to prepare something on comoparative adjectives. As for the material preparation, it was a really hard procedure for me. First of all, it was very difficult to prepare a material which is hard enough to use with B2 level students. After getting some feedback from the mentor teacher, I finally managed to prepare something appropriate for students. As for teaching procedure, there occurred another problem. The mentor teacjher said that she could only allocate 10 minutes for my teaching. So, I could not do all the exercises that I had prepared in the classroom. Despite all of these things, my teaching-I think- was very good. In my first teeaching, I had felt very nervous. In this second teaching experience -despite having very limited time- I did my best.
I want to share something about our mentor teacher. Actually she is a very professional teacher although she is not very experienced (her forth year in teaching). She has very good use of English and she seems to have got a good pedagogical education. She is very good at doing her job, dealing with the students, managing the classroom. On the other hand, she is such a strict teacher. Some of the students in the class are naughty, and when they misbehave the teacher reacts very harshly. Sometimes we (I and Osman) find her right for her attitude because sometimes students really exaggerate. But sometimes we don’t stand thinking that actually the one who exaggerates is the teacher herself. There is not a friendly relationship between the students and the teacher. And we have an impression that students do not like their teacher very much. I often think that she mustn’t be so strict and should have a friendly relationship with her students. But I don’t have any idea about what I would do if I was in her place.
YanıtlaSilBu yorum yazar tarafından silindi.
YanıtlaSilI want to answer Canan's question about effectivness of pracicum. It helped me be realistic:) Last semester I did my practicum in high school in Balgat. When I compare these two schools, there is a huge difference since the English proficiency changed dramatically. In that school I was dealing with "the meaning of weekend" or some basic grammar rules such as using "am" with first singular person. Here, they may not be talking fluently but the school culture, student quality encouraged me. I may want to work in HAYAL if I choose MEB.
YanıtlaSilHi friends!
YanıtlaSilEmine, your way of teaching simple past tense and perfect tense is really interesting and effective one. I also like that idea. Congratulations! :)
Ersin, I think every teacher has their teaching and management style, so I don't think that she would chance this behaviour easily. With the passing of time, when she learn about her students more,she may be more tolerant to them.
YanıtlaSilHi friends :)
YanıtlaSilDuygu, I cannot agree with you more than that:)
We found the opportunity of appling what we have learnt for four years. We could see the real atmosphere of a classroom. I really realized that being a teacher is my job. I believe that I won't be regretful if I work as a teacher in the future. I haven't decided on the level or the age of the students that I work with most yet. After this experience, I can see that our lives and characters will shape according to our occupations. I have started to behave like a teacher in my real life, in my room in the dormitory for instance. I want to be a helper or a teacher to one of my friends repeating the preparatory class. I can say teaching is a real delight :)
Canan, you are absolutely right in saying that "teaching is a real delight" but at the same time it is such a difficult responsibility. You may be the only model in front of your studnets. So, you have to be careful not to mislead them. I hope we can all manage to be good teachers, guides, friends, advisors of our students...
YanıtlaSilCanan, at first, I had doubts about teaching, beacuse I was not sure whther I willl be successful or not. However after our teachings in practicum, I realized that I have the necessary skills and I can do it. Actulally, I enjoyed teaching while doing the teaching task 3. Now I can not wait to start teaching I can say that:)
YanıtlaSilToday the teacher asked the students to hand in their term projects. But only two students had their assignments ready with them. In fact, almost all of the students in the class are very bright and hard working. So, when I saw there were only two students handing in their assignments, I was surprised. As we know very well from our own experience, 9th grade is one of the most difficult years in one’s student life. They do not study only one of science, math, literature and English. They study all of them in detail. They enter very hard exams, and they submit lots of assignments. I think the work load is too heavy for those students. After studying English in detail in the prep year, that much homework is not necessary in the 9th grade, I think. I do not help pitying those students. This educational sytem does not let students live their chilhood.
YanıtlaSilI see that someone says “teaching is a real delight” this is true to some degree but unless, we as prospective teachers, are discouraged. Yes, I’m implying that I was discouraged because of our mentor teacher’s inconvenient remarks about us. And in those last days I’m seeing that neither the teacher is enthusiastic to teach something nor the students are willing to learn something, and this is not what I was imagining about the collage, the teacher and the students. I don’t know what kind of a teacher ı will be, but ı know what kind of a teacher ı won’t.
YanıtlaSilDear Hial and Duygu, frist of all because of some technical problems between this blog and me, I couldn’t respond you earlier. Thanks for your praising about teaching S.past and P. Perfect. But it was actually Hale’s idea not mine. But we are a team Hale, Hatice and me. So I can accept your praise, anyway thank you.
YanıtlaSilCanan, this course is very useful for us. As Duygu said, we had chance to apply what we have learned during 3.5 years. Teaching is more than knowing theories and methods perfectly. Without teaching English, without being in a real classroom, something will always be missing. But still I have some doubts whether I want to teach English or not. I cannot answer this question until I have my own classroom because the relationship between the students/other teachers at school and us is not so real. They don’t see us as real teachers, and the other teachers may sometimes assume that we are the student of that school. For example last week I was in the teachers’ WC and one of the teacher overreacted me, then she realized that I’m not student and she apologized. The only positive thing about this event is that it means I’m looking younger : )
YanıtlaSilI agree with my friends who wrote about the usefulness of this course. As you said, theory and practice are completely different from each other. Since we were not educated with the techniques and approaches that we are learning at university, putting that theory into practice is no easy thing for us. Theory and practice must be given equal importance, but unfortunately university education in Turkey involves very little practice. The number of internship courses should be increased. Starting with the second grade, students should start to familiarize with the field that they are going to work in, as in the case of Europe. This will bring solution to many problems regarding the efficiency of vocational education. Also it will be a great contribution to the work force of the country.
YanıtlaSilHi all
YanıtlaSilWe are getting closer to the end. It is exiting isn’t it? I think we did a good job, I mean the whole class. I wish the next term will be easier and more fruitful. Emine states that the teachers don’t see us as real teachers. Actually they are right to a degree, because we are so young and we have a lot to learn. And maybe there will come a time in which we will be mentor teacher and we will have student teachers to whom we will be more helpful.
Ersin, You might be right about increasing the number of training courses, but I think that would not change much, because everything is artificial during this training. And I believe that a teacher can not be a fully competent teacher unles he or she has their own classes.
YanıtlaSilActully I agree with Hatice. This practicum term is not real enough to help us experince school environment and teaching.However, still it works. At least we see and observe the atmosphere. The length may be cahnged and we can be called as asistants. So that we can feel the real responsility.
YanıtlaSilYou are right about your claims. Those teaching practices are a bit artificial, and student teachers are not given full responsibility. As I wrote in my previous comment,I think, if the practice courses begin at the second grade,this artificiality will decrease towards the last grade, and our mentors will feel more free to give us more responsibility. Also, we will have chance to see how theory can be put into practice more effectively. We all learn lots of theoretical things in the 2nd and 3rd grade, but never see them in practice, and then we just forget all of them. Maybe, putting that knowledge into practice can make it permanent.
YanıtlaSilErsin, it is really different to teach in an environment that you are observed by other teachers.I must say that I really feel nervous when I am observed and I can not show my potential and I can not "live" the lesson. Yesterday,our mentor teacher instructed us what to do and gave the responsibilty of some of the students. For, one group I taught some of the things they did not know and we did the activities together. It was REALLY enjoyable. They asked questions and wanted to me repat the things thay did not understand. I got the taste of teaching. But, many of the mentor teachers do not do that. So, I still stand behind what I said. I do not think that more artificial practice will help us. What should we do is that we should choose mentor teachers very carefully.
YanıtlaSilAlso, I know that some of the universities appoint someone for the trainee teacher they supervise and help them for their first year of teaching and they also provide them with in-service training. I believe that is more helpful. You have your own class and also you have someone to consult with.
In theory, Ministiry of National Education has this kind of implementation. You are not a "full" teacher, as far as I know, unless you complete 2 years of teaching and during this period you should have a mentor, but this can not be put into practice, allegedly we do not have enough teachers. Shortly, first of all, we should put this implementation into practice in my opininon.
Hi everyone!
YanıtlaSilWe are about to finish our teachings, so I also want to talk about this course. I think this course is really a useful one, so I agree with Ersin that the number of practice teaching lessons should be increased. For example, we can start observing from the 3rd grade. Up to this year, we haven’t experienced the teaching in a real class. We did our micro-teachings, everything was artificial but they were also very helpful to improve ourselves. This year we have a chance to make lesson in a real classroom and school environment. We really have to consider carefully about instructions, materials, lesson plan etc. Our mentor teacher is a really nice man, so he doesn’t make us feel nervous. His demands from us were really logical like authentic materials and colorful activities which will attract students’ attention. He hasn’t criticized us harshly or discouraged us. I think all the mentor teachers shouldn’t discourage student teachers from teaching. Instead, they should be model for us and affect us positively. As our teacher was calm, we were also calm while teaching. Yes, sometimes we were very excited, but it is very normal I think. Besides, he left all the responsibility to us during the lesson. So I haven’t felt artificiality but felt like I am the real teacher of the class.
Today I did the teaching task 3. I used the coursebook by adapting it.During the lesson, I got disaoopinted at some points because the students were very active but not interested in the lesson. I tried to give the instructions but they did not listen to me. I had to shout at some points to be heard.However the mentor teacher sa,d that I was unnecassarily stressed because there was not that much noise. She said that ın general I was good. The teacher said that today was friday and they were tired after five days' work.
YanıtlaSilApart from the classroom experiences, we also have experienced the extracurricular ones. We have not only met real students, but also school principal, teachers, canteen keeper etc. as a teacher. We have greeted many teachers, sit with them in a teachers’ room and had a conversation as a teacher. Therefore, such kind of experiences gave us many ideas about being a teacher. For example, I really liked the idea of being in a school as a teacher. If I haven’t experienced such a thing, I may not consider being a teacher. I have even talked with an assistant principle about being a principle and this also gave me some ideas.
YanıtlaSilIn contrast to this, some other student teachers may don’t like teaching or school environment, so this will be an idea for them to become a teacher or not in the future. If we haven’t experienced such a thing, we might be late for taking some decisions.
Heiligenschein, I also feel sorry like you because the book is really not effective for communicative language teaching, apart from this it doesn’t provide authentic materials. The teacher doesn’t make any adaptation at all. However she sometimes changes the activities places and passes the pronunciation parts. I observe that the students get bored during the lessons. Fortunately last week she started using the book, Q-Skills. It is obviously a better book than the New Bridge. However, there is again a problem. As they started from the first unit and they had already done the same topics with the MEB book, Q-skills is too easy for the students now. They already know the vocabulary and the grammar being thought in the book. The new things are only the activities.
YanıtlaSilI also did my teaching task 3 on Friday. I was sick with the flu and I had problems in using my voice during the lesson. After all, in my activities the students were active and in some points the kids just got engaged in that I just let t go because I saw that they were enjoying themselves. They clapped their hands and laughed much and I got happy with them. The activities aimed at making a rehearsal of the grammar and therefore I saw that it was unnecessary to be so much serious and I also enjoyed myself.
YanıtlaSilHi friends and Özlem;
YanıtlaSilThank you for your answers to my question. I have learnt you opinion about the course and being a teacher.
Congratulations Özlem. I could not manage to be relax enough when I was teaching something. In fact, I would be relax if there was not a teacher observing you :)I believe that most of these teachings did not reflect the real teacher inside us, because being the only power in the class changes most of the thing. I am not comfortable enough for some reasons although I am generally comfortable in communicating people in the real life. I hope I will be better about this point in my last teaching with Müge Hoca.
I also had a chance to have a look at the coursebook that is prepared by MEB and is used by public schools. it is 8 graders' book. Probably many of us are familiar with that book "spot on". If my memory is not wrong, the name of the book was same when we were at 8th grade. The level of the book is a bit upper for primary school children. I wonder if students can really understand that book. All of the skills are equally covered. In contrast to the lessons at public schools, it is not grammar based. Units are constructed around a particular topic, and the coursebook is kept student centered as much as possible. It seemed like a good book to me. Even if it has some major problems most important of which is authenticity of the language. The texts do not reflect the real life usage of language. It is very obvious that they are written by Turkish speaking people.
YanıtlaSilToday, I did my last teaching :)
YanıtlaSilI was good to take informative and useful feedbacks from Müge hoca. I am braver now to be a teacher than before :)
On Thursday, we will go to school for the last time. Today I looked at the class and felt that I would miss them because they are our first students. I want to take a photo of them to remember them all the time as my firsts. As usual it is dramatic for me to leave somewhere or someone :) I hope it will be a nice semester for both me, my friends and the students in HAYAL.
Hi friends, last week we did our third teaching. Hilal and I separated the parts as before. Our topic was "since" and "for" usage. Hilal taught the topic and I did the acitvity part. It was really enjoyable for me and for the students. In the activity, students played a board game. I divided the class into two groups and they raced with each other. The students were really cheerful and they participated the activity willingly. This made me happy because I had thought that maybe they didn't want to participate the activity. However, it was quite the opposite. This gave me confidance about teahcing. I hope my activity in the final teaching will be as enjoyable as this one.
YanıtlaSilHi friends :)
YanıtlaSilBecause it's almost the end of the semester, I will make an overall evaluation about this course and my practicing teacher experience. For the course I can say that this course is one of the courses thorough which I have developed myself. I think the reason for this is that we had a chance to practice what we have learnt in the methodological courses we have taken so far in a real classroom environment and we all have realized how much it is different to teach students there. I mean, although during the micro teachings, everything is under control, we have seen this is not possible when we are teaching in the classrooms. For example, almost all of us are complaining about time management. I can’t understand how long a presentation takes 15 minutes during the teaching while it takes just 5 minutes when we practice it over and over again before the teaching. Then, we have seen that students may not understand the thing we say even if we explain it again and again. Moreover, we have witnessed that sometimes we may be unable to answer to the students’ questions or we may have to change our lesson plans due to the inadequate equipment of the school or unexpected breakdowns. Apart from the chance this course gives us to experience the real classrooms; I also like the tasks given. I think these tasks made us aware of many things we didn’t realize before. They made us to analyze the behaviors of our mentor teachers and understand the rationale behind them. Also, they helped us to create our own teaching philosophy. When it comes to my practicing teaching experience, I have also faced almost all the situations I mentioned above in adapting to a real classroom and they helped me to improve myself. Moreover, my mentor teacher is very professional as she has been teaching 15 years, so while I was observing him, I have learnt some effective techniques to achieve classroom management, time management and to handle with breakdowns and problematic students in the classroom. Also, I have learnt a variety of enjoying activities that can be easily applied in classrooms. With the feedbacks she gave me after teachings, I have seen the points that I must pay attention to. Furthermore, I haven’t lived any difficulty with the equipments or with the administration because ODTÜ Koleji is a well-equipped and disciplined school.
Hi, everyone
YanıtlaSilToday was our last day at school. Our mentor teacher allocated the last hour for us, she said that we could say a goodbye to the students. The students also said their thoughts about us. It was nice to hear their ideas and how they reacted to us. They generally said good things, one of the students said that he didn't like us at the first two weeks or so but then he got used to us and started enjoying our lessons. The students also mentioned that we were very anxious at our first teaching task, and they were right. Later on as they got used to us we also got used to the classroom atmosphere and the students. Our mentor teacher also thanked us for being respectful and responsible; she gave us a little present. I really got embarrassed because we hadn't thought about buying a present to her. All in all, this was n effective and also enjoyable practicum for me.
This week, I did my last teaching and I completed all ten weeks for the practicum. Despite the problems we had and the hard work we did for the weeks to finish the lessons was a bit difficult. There were some students that I talked to in the break time and I really liked learning about their life at the school and their ideas related to the English lessons and other lessons. Also, we did about ten observation tasks during the term and I realized that the students also observed us more than we did. One of the students who sits on the front side said that our hands were shaking at our first teaching. To sum up, practicum provided me different experiences related to teaching and I realized that that experience with real students in a real classroom cannot be got in any other circumstance.
YanıtlaSilHi everyone,
YanıtlaSilOn Friday I did my final teaching. Before the final teaching, I assumed that I don’t like teaching and I do not want to be a teacher. I was a bit desperate about my job. But, in final teaching I really enjoyed teaching, I saw that I really like the students .I realized that if the teacher taught willingly, if she liked the students and what she did, she wouldn’t get older. Because the students are so energetic and they give positive energy to others. Although they are tired, they are away from their parents and they have so many courses to study; they are still happy and they smile all the time. One becomes happy when she looks at them. While doing my final teaching, they really helped me by participating actively and at the end of the course they gave clap to us and one of the sts said “Thanks to teachers like you, we love English”. Nothing could make me happier than this sentence that they. During the break time we went to their classes to say good bye. When we entered the class again they applauded us. I was both surprised and affected because they did not reveal that they love us before.
Hi everyone,
YanıtlaSilOn firday I did my last teaching with Emine and Hale. I realized that I was not excited at all.As you understand from what I wrote so far, I did not believe that practice teaching would not prove so useful, but I realizd that I was wrong, because the first day that I entered the class I was so nervous, but in time that was gone and I am very confident in myself now. Also, the love of students is great,even within this short period of time, we had a connection and on the last day I was very emotional. One student said to my mentor " hocam masallah bütün stajyerleri özenle seçmiş gibisiniz hepsi çok iyiler."It felt really good to hear that:)I will do my best to be a succesful teacher, because nothing can be compared to see that your students learn from you.
Just an advice to those who has not done their final teachings yet, forget about the fact that you are being observed and enjoy teaching, then I believe your final teaching will be quite good.
Waoww I cannot believe that school experince course came to an end:) As Hatice said, I was also thinking that this course was not helpful at all but now I realize I got used to the idea of being a teacher. The school and our mentor teacher helped us a lot. Havva Hoca encouraged us through the way and gave us advises and some clues:) Final teaching went better than I expected. Müge Hoca was also understanging and thoughtful. She paid attention not to disturb us during the lesson. I can say sometimes I forgot her existence in the class. I really enjoyed being an intern in Hayal.
YanıtlaSilBy the way, many people ask who am I:) I'm Hale, my previous user name was German version of Hale.
YanıtlaSilHi everyone,
YanıtlaSilThis week I completed my teaching task 3. It was great. Let me explain why it was great. I planned to do a debate on body art in the classroom. When I showed my lesson plan to my mentor teacher, she said that this was a good plan but difficult to administer. I felt a little bit disappointed; however, I was really willing to do this activity in the classroom. Finally the teaching day came. I was really excited. Everything went well in my teaching. At the end of the lesson, I felt really happy that the teacher was not right=)
I noticed that all friends who completed their final teaching are quite satisfied with the lessons they taught. Most of us seem to be becoming aware of that we will be teachers when we graduate, and the general impression about teaching seems to be changing. When we first came to that school, majority of our classmates did not want to be teachers. There was a negative impression about teaching. Many people were saying that teaching is the last job that I want to do. But when we come to the last year of university, many of us are planning to choose some kind of teaching career. Is it possiblly because our school changed our views about teaching, or are there other reasons?
YanıtlaSilHi friends;
YanıtlaSilYesterday We didn't go to our schools for the fisrt time after a long period. It lasted 10 weeks, we went there twenty times. Nevertheless, When I look back on, I think that I didn't get bored going and teaching there. I hope not only our days, weeks but also our years will spend nicely as a teacher.
Last week was a good experience for me. The students and the teacher behaved us very well. The students added us via facebook and said that they loved us after the time passed. I told my friend in the group that what a difficult thing to chance a school for a teacher who is accustomed to teaching there. It was really short time for us but I felt what a teacher feels when he/she leaves a school where she spends lots of time.
Hi all,
YanıtlaSilI really wonder whether being a teacher in high school or in primary school is better. Actually, in the second term, I want to be in a primary school because the children seems to me more open to learn but I have to learn how is the teaching like in high school. I was really happy in my school this semester, I hope you will have chance to work with our mentor teacher. I think we have many things to learn from her in terms of teacher-student relations.
Bu yorum yazar tarafından silindi.
YanıtlaSilHello everyone!
YanıtlaSilMost of us finished their final teaching and everybody seems contended. The ones who don't want to be teacher changed their mind with this practicum. This is great! I also find this practicum very useful as I mentioned before. This term, we went a state school and observed the students and teaching atmosphere there. In the second term, I want to go to private school to have an experience there, too. I wonder the differences betwen them and the atmosphere of the schools.
Hi everybody
YanıtlaSilEverybody who has done their final teaching will understands how happy I’m because of doing my final teaching. During our three teaching it was a little exciting but when Müge Hoca was there it was much more exciting. In spite of some small problems it wasn’t bad I think. When I think about how much improvement we have experiencing during this whole term, I’m sure after the second term we all will be quite bright teachers. I wish everybody will have a good holiday.
As Osman said, we also did our final teaching. I cant say everything went fine. We had a technical problem at the beginning of the lesson. So we could not do our listening activity which we thought students would like very much. Because of that problem at the beginning of the lesson, our morale collapsed and it effected the rest of the lesson. But Müge Hoca was very understanding. She said she would not blame us for the problem and she would not cut any point for it. But none of us is concerned with problems or points. We are just concerned with the relief of getting rid of the burdens on us.
YanıtlaSilI haven't also experinced private school environment. However; from the comments I read here it looks totally different.
YanıtlaSilEveryone who have gone to state school this semester wants to have an experience in a private school next semester but I am not sure about that. Private schools always seemed scary to me but anyway I have to face with my fears:)
YanıtlaSilI really agree with Hila. I wonder the atmosphere of different schools. This semester I was in a state high school. I want to be in a primary school certainly and want to work with young leraners. Besides this, I want to be in a private school in order to see the difference. While deciding on where to work, this will help us a lot in my opinion.
YanıtlaSilI was at a private school this semester and I can say that it is no scary thing at all. I can even claim that teaching at a private school is definitely easier and more enjoyable.Because students already know a good deal of English and they are mostly eager to learn more English. When you speak English, they do not look at you with blank eyes, they immediately understand you and react accordingly. As they are all selected and bright students, we did not have any difficulty in teaching English to them. But on the other hand, you are expected to do your best at a private school. When we did our first teaching, we were thinking that we had a good performance. But when I saw my grade I was a bit schocked, because it was lower than I expected. I think if I had taught the same lesson at a public school, most probably my grade would have been better.
YanıtlaSil