Training Week 9

We are back in the classroom today, teaching a group of Entry 1 learners. This is the second to last teaching practice week with the key objective of our students being able to prepare a short piece of work about their own journeys from their homelands to Kingston. 

We start off with some map work. We show our students iconic pictures of several capital cities, the countries and continents they are in and their orientation (north, south, east, west). Then we gave an example of the journey of Cesar Picton had from Senegal to Kingston in the 18th Century, teaching some key vocabulary relating to this, which would help our students when they were describing their own experiences.

Our students then had the opportunity to practice the new vocabulary in pairs. We all learned a lot about where each person had come from, why they came to Kingston and what they enjoy about living here. There was lots of participation from our learners who seemed to really enjoy this session, and they even gave our volunteer tutors a round of applause at the end of it!

After lunch, when our learners had departed, we settled down for a theory lesson focused on error correction. Specifically, what errors should be corrected, when, how and by whom. Once again, our ESOL tutor Emma, taught us a new and important concept using engaging and memorable techniques. 

Training Week 8

This week we have arranged to meet our students and tutors at Kingston Museum. The group splits into two, half going off on a local history tour of Kingston town centre, while the other half stayed for a guided tour of the Museum. I stayed with the group which toured the Museum and found our guide extremely well informed, using lots of props to help explain the exhibits to our students. There really is something for everyone at the Museum, with exhibits ranging from Bronze and Iron Age artefacts, to the Anglo-Saxon Kings who were crowned in Kingston, and showing how Kingston has changed through more modern decades. Our students were asked to pick their favourite exhibit and write a few sentences, with our help, about what it was and why they liked it. 

When we reconvened after lunch for our theory lesson, the focus this week was on the use of authentic materials in teaching. Authentic materials are those not specifically prepared for teaching purposes, for example, information leaflets, forms, newspapers and recipe books. We were split into small groups, each given different authentic materials and we were asked to consider the challenges posed by the language and layouts used. We then were tasked to come up with solutions to overcome these challenges within the context of a plan for a reading lesson. I found this to be a really useful lesson and one which is likely to be well used by us with our students in the future.  

Training Week 7

This week we have been asked to progress our more advanced students to a point where they feel able to write a story about their personal journey to the UK. This presented its own challenges to our teaching group. We were paired up and asked to cover several topics, including a lesson designed to teach vocabulary relating to comparison and emotion; a grammar lesson teaching quantifiers, comparatives and superlatives e.g. many, more, most;  and then our bit, how to bring all this and the information from previous lessons together to create a story. 

My partner and I prepared a piece describing what an autobiography is and the sort of information that might be included in it, as well as a suggested structure that our students might follow. We each took turns to give our students information about our own journeys to Kingston, mine all the way from Glasgow on an rather shabby overnight bus in the '90s and Tatiana's rather more glamorous flight from Brazil earlier this year. This personal touch seemed to engage our students and encourage them to volunteer ideas and to make a positive start on writing their own stories. 

In our feedback session, our tutor Veronica observed that we had all demonstrated good progress in our teaching practice over a short period of time. My feeling is that our confidence has increased with every lesson and that a combination of preparation and learning from this time in front of students is indispensable. 

After lunch, once our students had left, we reconvened in the classroom with our tutor Emma who continued last week's theme of literary skills. This week the main focus moved from reading skills to writing skills. It is important for us to understand this as we are likely to come across students with varied levels of ability and we need to understand how to best develop our lesson plans for each individual.

Training Week 6

Today we are back in the classroom. Last week our tour of Kingston included a stop at Cesar Picton's House and today we have been asked to deliver a lesson, suitable for our group of more advanced students, relating to his journey from Senegal to Kingston in 1761 and his subsequent life in England. 

The focus of our group's lesson was on listening and writing skills. Our students would listen to a video clip about Cesar Picton's life and then work in pairs to write the answers to some questions relating to what they had just heard. Our fellow volunteers had already taught some of the tricky vocabulary the students would need prior to our session. 

This was the first time for us teaching "on our feet" in front of a fairly large group. It was quite a daunting prospect, and once again, I was pleased that our preparation had been thorough. The session went smoothly and our students left with a page of model answers to compare with the work that they had completed.

The afternoon session kicked off with a most interesting challenge to translate a sheet of symbols into English. This was designed to demonstrate to us the many, often subconscious, skills we deploy when reading. Fascinating stuff!

Today it was my first time teaching. I had prepared a lesson with my group to talk about family. It was a 1:1 session, so I was a bit nervous as I knew I would be watched by the rest of my group and Emma, our teacher. But it wasn't as scary as I first thought, it was actually quite fun and I felt that I was not nervous at all. It was a good experience getting to teach about my own family which I think the student also enjoyed. After our teaching practice was over the students went home and we were given feedback. I was quite happy with my feedback and it really encouraged me to consider becoming a teacher in the future which is what I'm aiming for. Especially after experiencing my first time teaching properly with feedback by our teacher, I feel very motivated and I highly recommend anyone of any age to join LEAH.