As Ruby's
cooperating teacher and teaching mentor, I enjoyed showcasing my teaching
practices and lesson planning strategies for her. We often discussed her lesson
plans in English, and I offered my advice before carrying it out in class. This
teaching demo went quite well as planned. The professor, my principal, and
colleagues also said many good things about her during the class discussion
session.
1. EMI
Student teachers
must be able to use English as a medium of instruction in teacher selection. We
cannot overemphasize how important it is during teaching demonstration and job
interviews.
Ruby did a good
job in terms of EMI today. She delivered her instructions fluently with only a
couple of pauses. The students were able to comprehend and stay on track,
too.
2. Task-basked and Backward Design
Throughout the
whole class, the students were busy performing tasks collaboratively. They had
to answer questions, discussed the order of the dates, interview each other,
and so on.
All the tasks are
connected, with the previous one serving as scaffolding for the next one. For
example, with the interview worksheet completed, students are able to talk
about who they asked and what they said in English.
3. Differentiation
The students were
divided into five groups based on the scores of the midterm. Each group was
made up of three English levels of students. Based on the difficulty of
questions or tasks, Ruby called on Seers, Knights, or Villagers accordingly.
Everyone would have equal participation and contribution in class.
4. Authentic Context
Some major school
events of KMJH were selected, such as the opening ceremony, PTA, science
competition, and so on for the ordering task. The idea is to create a need to
use the sentence pattern in real-life situations.
Besides, she also
invited some teachers and students to make the materials more intriguing by
recording their voices. Then, out of three choices, students had to take a
guess the birth month of that person. Everybody was laughing upon hearing
"噴水雞肉飯" in Taiwanese from Billy.
5. Visually Attractive
Ruby is creative
in making her PowerPoint slides appealing. There are usually many cute cartoon
icons with animation effects. The layout is clean and organized, too.
With all the good
things about her demo today, I do have some suggestions to make it better
though. Once again, teacher selection in Taiwan is an extremely severe
competition. To stand out among numerous candidates, I think there are three
things she can improve on:
1. Transition
When transitioning
to the next phase of lecturing or task, we want to make our instructions more
clear and also get the students ready for it. We can wrap up a bit of what just
learned and hint what's coming up next as well.
2. KISS
We need to show
off fluent English in teacher selection but tend to make it lengthy and
difficult to understand. Keep it short and simple. Use verbs to tell what
exactly your students have to do. By doing so, it will also diminish the
teacher talking time.
3. Pronunciation and Intonation
Pay attention to
those words you tend to mispronounce. If you come across a judge who is as
picky as me, that can mean a disaster to you because I can't stand an English
teacher with horrible pronunciation. After all, he or she's going to impact an
awful amount of students throughout the whole career.
To maximize Ruby's
student teaching experience, I often encouraged her to think outside of the box
and try different things. When I did workshops or teaching demonstrations, I
would also invite her to come and observe. On top of that, she immersed herself
in all the extra "burden", including the Korean sister school's
educational visit, host family training workshop, Readers' Theater Competition,
to name just a few. May she take in all these wonderful experiences and have a
killer job interview in teacher selection.
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