Lesson 1

Link to procedure presentation : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ODLsC0Py_WC6sjPkFGvGKvdzQS-17roX/view?usp=sharing

PLANNING AND PREPARATION FOR THE LESSON

I planned to start the lesson with break-the-ice activity which I included in order for the students to get to know a bit about myself in a fun guessing game activity supposed to be done in English and serve as a warm-up.

Next on my plan was to prepare the cultural presentation about Belarus. Cultural awareness and intercultural competencies are parts of the curriculum in OUAS and the objective of my presentation was to familiarise the students to what turned out to be a completely unknown to them culture, to give them general knowledge about the country with the view of the fact that Belarus is has a rapidly growing industry and technology fields and the students might find themselves working and dealing with customers/suppliers/ partners from Belarus throughout their engineering careers.

My guiding teacher gave me the textbook the students are using in the course and free hands on what I teach and how I teach it in the following weeks. The textbook for the course is an electronic one, all the materials and exercises can be accessed by students in promentor.net wherever they are and whenever they want.I had to plan for 90 minutes; two 45 min lessons joined together. The chapter of the textbook focused on developing listening comprehension, reading comprehension, writing skills and building grammar, lexis and functional language. If I think methodologically, the whole chapter could have been divided in 6 full 45 classes: reading, listening, writing, lexis, function and grammar lessons. I couldn’t have possibly done the whole chapter within 90 mins, so I needed to pick the logically connected tasks and arrange them in the right order for a better lesson flow. I decided to focus on listening, lexis and grammar items present in  the listening task as well as functional language students came across while completing the tasks. I left the reading comprehension task as an extra. My decision to go with this lesson structure was based on the fact that I believed that by listening and working with the lexis, functional language and grammar present in the listening task students will have more coherent practice of the target language, hearing it in the recording and using it subsequently in writing and speaking tasks. I included pair-share interaction after each exercise and task given to the students, so that the language items will be produced in speech. I believe I had a strong lesson plan with logical stages. I thought carefully through and wrote down the interaction patterns within each lesson stage. I anticipated problems with technology, so I made hard copies of all the materials I was going to teach. I sent all my teaching materials to a flash drive, my email and google drive, just in case something does not work. I took all the props I needed in the lesson (paper, dice, whiteboard pens). I printed and cut everything on time. I was ready for theclass.  It took me around 16 hours in total to prepare for this class, create materials with visuals, work on stages. It is a lot of prep time for 2×45 classes, however, with it being my first class, I needed for it to be flawless. 

HOW DID I FEEL BEFORE CLASS?
Even though I was ready for the class physically, mentally I was not ready just as much. It was the first time I taught in a classroom full of Finnish students, engineering students, students in higher education, not high school, and in an almost all-male classroom. I had also never met those students before, so I was not much aware of what I was walking into. I believe this is the exact feeling every teacher gets when walking into the classroom on the first day of the course. Its the mixture of excitement, fear of the unknown, fear of not making a good first impression, fear of seeing your students staring at you with facial expressions of “What is she doing? She crazy… “. Does this feeling go away with time? I’m not sure. My guiding teacher (teaching for 20 years) answered this question simply: “No, it really doesn’t”. Turns out I’m in for this “first-day-of-class-teacher-freak-out” experience for good.

HOW DO I FEEL AFTER THE CLASS?
I feel happy that the ice is broken. It was awkward in the beginning when the students saw that a completely strange person is going to teach them, but step by step during the class we felt more and more comfortable working together, I felt more and more confident and the students felt more and more at ease talking to me and to each other around me.

WHAT WENT WELL IN CLASS? WHAT WORKED?
In the beginning of class I gave a cultural presentation about Belarus. I tried to connect with the students giving the presentation from the angle of comparing Belarus and Finland, history, food, sports, which students related to. In the very beginning of the class I made it more interactive by asking students to brainstorm with the peers what they knew about my country. I was pleased to see that the students started actively googling when they got that task, the interest was aroused. After working in small groups, the whole class admitted that before they knew exactly 2 things: vodka and World of Tanks game. The presentation was a success, as it arose interest, it was very visual, included videos, and very little actual “talking” from my part. I also practiced beforehand some jokes, some of which, despite being nervous, I managed to use, and they worked.  In the lesson- proper part I feel that all the tasks worked rather well. My phonetic drill was not expected (group drillà individual drill), students did not anticipate being called on individually to pronounce words, however, I believe they really enjoyed it quite much. The board game at the end of the lesson for prepositions of time was very successful and most of the students were playing, laughing and having fun.  The whole flow of the lesson was logical, it had smooth transitions, which I feel motivated students throughout the whole class.

WHAT DIDN’T GO SO WELL? WHAT WOULD I CHANGE?
Upon their arrival students launched their laptops and most of them opened the chapter we were about to study, where they could easily find the dialogue we were about to listen. Before the lessons the guiding teacher told me that usually the students do the listening tasks on their own with their headsets. When they do it, they access the text of the dialogue and press play on the sound button next to the text. By doing so, they listen and follow the written text. In my professional opinion, it is not an effective listening task as the presence of the text you read while listening to it turns it automatically into a reading task. Students are trying to use both listening and reading comprehension skills at the same time, with reading comprehension being the main channel for extracting the meaning. Students rely on the text being in front of their eyes, and they pay little to no attention to actual listening and extracting meaning from the spoken speech. I am an avid supporter of the pure listening tasks, where students don’t have the text in front of them but need to concentrate on catching the meaning from listening and making sense of what they’ve heard. I decided to get them out of their comfort zone of listening on their own and my plan was for us to listen all together. However, before the listening task I did not instruct the students not to open the online chapter on their laptops ( which they did when they came in), because it completely slipped my mind that the text is available for them on their laptops, if they know where to look for it, and many did open it, which I realised after only when we were doing the second reading task. Not all, but many students were reading the text when listening, and it made me realize that I need to make my instructions better, and word them carefully and explicitly for every task and stage.

Another thing that did not go so smoothly was the pairing of the students. There was one student who was rather upset and angry with me when I asked him to stand up and move in order to form a pair. Knowing that this student is not so eager to move away from his seat, next time I could ask someone else to move next to him or ask this student to sit next to someone else right in the beginning of the class.

MY STRENGTHS

I believe that my main strengths were:

• a well thought through stages of the lesson and logical sequence
• attractive materials
• abundance of visuals
• interactive tasks
• rapport
• time management.  I managed to do everything planned , leaving expected extra tasks as homework.

Rapport has proved to be one of the major strengthsand it helped significantly to melt the initial ice. I caught myself smiling often, I was giving praise, I felt that the students were communicating comfortably with me and in front of me.

POINTS FOR IMPROVEMENT

• I need to give more explicit instructions and think what could be confusing for the students. I think I will write down every instruction on board (doc/power point) to avoid any confusion. Also, I need to keep developing my ICQs (Instruction check questions).
•  I would love to use more ‘crouching’ monitoring technique in the following sessions, as being trained to do so, I felt  VERY uncomfortable to be leaning over the desks and walking as a “prison guard” in the classroom along the rows, instead of crouching next to my students helping them, being at the same eye level. It always feels so much more comfortable!
• Be more confident of getting students out of their comfort zones with the seating arrangement. First lesson I was a bit a bit anxious to interfere with their usual sitting pattern, however, the number of people in the class allows me to experiment with the seating, which I’m willing to do in the following classes.

GUIDING TEACHER’S FEEDBACK

The teacher gave me a very positive feedback on my lesson. She said that the students were very engaged, and the lesson was logical, interactive and with good visuals. The transitions between the lesson stages according to the teacher were very smooth and the tasks were interesting and well- designed. She advised me to write down the instructions on the board for everyone to read when they do the task, to make sure that everyone in a large group can go back and check what they need to do. Also, her valuable suggestion was to be more assertive and even strict to remind students to speak English when I hear them switch to speaking Finnish. All in all, she enjoyed my lesson