Micro-teaching presentation #1 (FS19)

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Fazima Kausar on September 22, 2019 at 7:49pm

For my group’s micro-teaching activity, we were assigned to create a lesson plan based on learning profile. Learning profile is defined by Tomlinson (2001) as “Learning profile refers to ways in which we learn best as individuals.” In the text, Tomlinson sheds light on the different types of learning profiles students may have, these include auditory, visual, kinesthetic, etc. When making our lesson plan, my partners, Carolina and Evelyn, and I tried to cater to the previously listed learning profiles. We started the lesson off with a short video clip that presented different sports vocabulary with the help of a song. We did this in hopes that this would not only spark the interests of the students, but also cater to those that learn through auditory factors as well as those that more visually, since the video also demonstrated lots of fun visual images.

To help students practice their listening and speaking skills, we decided to incorporate a little activity in which we throw a ball to one another and ask each other a question regarding their favorite sport, this is an example of a kinesthetic activity. Then we decided to emphasize the difference between American football vs. football in the Spanish-speaking world, since both sports are such an integral part of their cultures. As Tomlinson states “culture affects how we learn…”

If there was anything we would do differently it would be to include more culture by incorporating Hispanic athletes from different sports. As well as when presenting the conjugations of the verb jugar, it would have been better to incorporate the conjugations of the verb in a dialogue or paragraph form. This would be a better example of contextualized grammar, considering we used a much more traditional approach to presenting the conjugations, known as a paradigm (Lee and VanPatten, 2003).

Tomlinson, C. A. (2001). How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-Ability Classrooms (2^nd Edition). Reston, VA: ASCD.

Lee, J. F., & VanPatten, B. (2003). Making communicative language teaching happen. Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Permalink Reply by Karolina Custodio on September 25, 2019 at 9:50pm

Hello Fazima,

Your group presentation helped us to understand how students learn best as individuals. Since students have different learning styles and they are unique, we as future teacher must plan our lessons applying methods that can help them to understand the language. Your presentation had a lot of visuals and different activities. Also, the topic of your lesson would have caught the attention of the students because sports is something that everyone enjoys. It would have students focused and interested in the lesson. Lastly, your group designed a game that would have students participate and produce the target language in addition to play while they learn. (108 words)

Permalink Reply by Geomyra Granados on September 22, 2019 at 7:53pm

The micro teaching that I was assigned to create with my partner was on reading. In this first activity we presented a video in order to catch the attention of the students. Following the video, we created an activity that required them to answer questions regarding what the saw on the video. According to Tomlison (2001) It is the instructor’s job to be able to catch the attention of the student. In the second activity, which is “while reading”, we created a small paragraph for them to read about the artist that we presented to the them. After reading the text, the students had to answer the following questions together with a partner, and afterwards read it out loud. Thirdly, we used and activity to engage the students with their classmates and therefore with the teacher as well. Our post-reading consisted of students creating a small paragraph which included them writing about the artist we were learning about by including the vocabulary that they learned in the target language throughout the lesson.

However after concluding the lesson, we realized that we made a huge mistakes with the activities since it did not include the main point of the lesson. After getting our feedback from our classmates, we are aware that the intended lesson did not include reading instead it was more grammar and writing. The vocabulary shown was also not intended for the level that we chose. Therefore, we are aware that in order to succeed in a reading lesson, we must present the according activities to the students in the target language. (265)

Permalink Reply by Dennis Galicia on September 22, 2019 at 8:24pm

Hello Giomyra:

Your teaching slice presented key concept for us. However, the sequencing of your activities was not clear at times. In other words, they were confusing. For instance, after reading your blog. I noticed that your lesson missed the main focus, which was reading comprehension. Which goes against the concepts presented by Lee and Van Patten (2003), regarding reading comprehension. According to the authors, each phase of the class should be synchronized to build into the following.

I would suggest that you begin with vocabulary introduction and previous knowledge during the pre-reading phase. Afterwards, the while reading, could be a text followed by games and comprehension checks. Lastly, the post-reading should be something that the students produce. Essentially, your focus should be connecting the text with the students.

(127 words)

References: 

Lee, J. F., & VanPatten, B. (2003). Making communicative language teaching happen. Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Permalink Reply by Maria Lorena Flores on September 23, 2019 at 6:02am

Geomyra:
I enjoyed your micro teaching, however, there were a lot of grammatical errors that could have been avoided, we have to be careful in the in the information we are giving to the students. Like you said, it was unclear to see the main point of the lesson and reading specially, there was not a lot of reading involved in the activities.
The pictures and video provided for your lesson were definitely colorful and engaging. According to Tomlinson, we should choose topics in which our youth would be interested in, therefore choosing Cardi B was a good choice, however I don’t think many parents would approve of it since she is not the greatest role model but then again who is nowadays.

Permalink Reply by Fazima Kausar on September 25, 2019 at 8:40pm

Hello Geomyra,

I believe starting your micro-teaching activity with a video is a great way to catch the attention of the students. But it may have been more beneficial to include some new vocabulary in the pre-reading phase. As Lee and VanPatten highlighted that when creating a lesson plan of the receptive skills, listening and reading, the lesson must be organized in a very specific organized manner to avoid any confusion and to let the content be understandable. I believe your production activity was very ideal for students to demonstrate their abilities. Of course next time, it will be better to make your lesson plan based on the content as opposed to grammar.

Permalink Reply by CAROLINA PUERTA on September 22, 2019 at 8:01pm

Our micro-teaching was related to the topic "learning profile differentiation" and we focused on different strategies to support this topic. Our teaching lesson was "vamos a jugar", we also focused on listening/speaking. At the beginning of the presentation, we took a ball to capture the attention of the students, since this varies in each student, some can be auditory, others visual, and another kinesthetic. We found this activity interesting because most of the students like sports, and in the practice part we used a game where they had to find the match corresponding to a card they had, and they had to ask their partner about this sport. In the part of the production, we could use the sport that the students have in common and that they join in groups and share about this sport, favorite players, favorite teams, etc. What we did differently based on the difference in instruction is that we use complex instruction "This powerful strategy emphasizes teachers studying their students to determine which intellectual strengths each student brings to the classroom"(Tomlinson p.64). As teachers we must know what abilities each student has and how we can exploit them. That is why we use activities both kinesthetic: when we take the ball so that they could touch it and also at the end of the class in the part of the production can be used as a game so that students can share the work they did in a group, we also use the visuals: photos, audios, and videos, and auditory which are the ones we used when they were individual work, couples, and groups. of sports, an example was "football" and some players were Lionel Messi and Ronaldinho, maps of South America, a very famous tennis player such as Rafael Nadal. We had several spelling mistakes during the presentation and one of the points we should improve is that when teaching and presenting vocabulary and grammar we must do it in a more contextualized way. (332 words)

Tomlinson, C. A. (2001). How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-Ability Classrooms (2^nd Edition). Reston, VA: ASCD.

Permalink Reply by Selena Jaquez on September 24, 2019 at 7:33pm

Carolina,

I enjoyed your micro-teaching activity presented in class, especially considering the fact that you included different activities about learning profile. Learning profile is important because it would help students develop a deeper understanding of who they are as learners. It also reflects on what motivates and challenges them when learning. The activities were well organized, however, as I mentioned in class, there were a lot of grammatical errors. It is important to keep this in mind because it is essential in order to master a language. 

Permalink Reply by Evelyn Salazar on September 22, 2019 at 8:03pm

The micro-teaching lesson that my classmates and I created was focusing on learning profile. Our focus was to take in to consideration the different students that can be in a classroom, and to help them to understand the content through the different styles of learning that will be better for them. The most interesting and gratifying part was to learn about the different kinds of students we can meet in the classroom and what are the better ways to teach them a second language. For that reason, we created different activities where students were able to work individually, some in pairs and others as a group. In our micro-teaching lesson, we used visual slides, audio and oral activities and kinesthetic presentation. According to Cook “A student’s learning style, intelligence preference, gender, and culture can influence learning profile”.

Something that could have been better was culture, although we included facts about Latin American sports and the differences in the United States, it was not enough. We could include cognates in sports because there many and talk about them. Also include not only the Latin America map but also Spain, because we constantly emphasize this country and their culture. Also, our vocabulary slide was too simple and with minimum purpose because the activity after the vocabulary was not related to the vocabulary. In the future I will pay more attention to the vocabulary and the activities should be connected and provide more meaning content. Something that my classmates and I omitted was to proof read and look for gramma errors or any misspelling, this should always be done because students will learn from us and we have to make sure we teach accurately.

Finally, I would like to say that the topic that we chose was fun, motivate and appropriate to the students, giving us freedom to implements different activities according to the level of our students.

Words 315

Reference

Cook, V. (2017). Second language learning and language teaching. 

Permalink Reply by Maria Lorena Flores on September 23, 2019 at 6:12am

Evelyn:

Most of the lesson was engaging and fun, I mostly liked the game your group provided which I believe makes learning fun for the students.  As you mentioned, helps them understand the concept through different styles of learning.  The lesson was well put together, however, there were a lot of grammatical errors in which as you mentioned previously students learn from us and we have to make sure that we look over and over our work before presenting it to our students, but at the end we all make mistakes and that is why we do this teaching slices to learn from each other.  The fact that you added sports into the lesson was a good choice specially when it came to explaining the differences in soccer and football which many people get confused.

Permalink Reply by Geomyra Granados on September 25, 2019 at 9:53pm

HI Evelyn, 

I really enjoyed observing your presentation. It was very interesting to see students' based activities. I really liked the idea of starting off with an activity that engages most of the students. It is crucial to do so. Tomlinson (2001) However, there were a few grammatical errors throughout the presentation. Like it was mentioned in class, those minimal errors could be fixed. Also, the sequence of the slides contained great activities for the students but not appropriate for the level that the lesson was intended to be for. Overall. I believed you group did a good job at presenting your teaching demo. I liked the interaction and the intentions that your all used throughout the lesson. 

Permalink Reply by melinda vargas on September 27, 2019 at 2:15pm

The micro-teaching activity assigned was on reading comprehension. We began the activity with a 1-minute snippet of an interview between Cardi B and la Mega 97.9FM in the interview Cardi B speaks in Spanish and talks about her family as well as her favorite Dominican food. According to Tomlinson (2001) by captivating the students interest it increases their attention and their able to understand as well as ability to remember parts of the lessoning relatable or interesting to the student. The Cardi B activity we conducted I believe was interesting and strong for our class because it captivated their attention by using someone, they are very familiar with from reality tv, music and Pepsi commercials. Many do not know that she is Dominican so it was a fun way of showing that some famous people they know are descendants of Spanish speaking countries although they may not look like it. Following the snippet of the video we present the vocabulary and what she stated via text for students to read. After the presentation of the text we provided questions for students to answer which will assess if they understood the text.  Based on feedback there are various things I would have done differently such as incorporating more reading so that it could be more focused on reading comprehension and provide a question after each paragraph. For differentiating instructional reasons, I would provide a more detailed article for native speakers who can read quickly, this can be observed by previous exercises. I would have incorporated more culture into the lesson by adding music or bringing samples of food to add to the cultural authenticity. Another thing I would have changed is the amount of grammatical errors presented in the slides because as VanPatten and many other scholars have stated a bad input is a bad output in which students will create the same mistakes we do because they learn our errors instead of the correct way to write or speak. (329)

Resources:

Tomlinson, C. A. (2001). How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-Ability Classrooms (2^nd Edition). Reston, VA: ASCD.

Lee, J. F., & VanPatten, B. (2003). Making communicative language teaching happen. Boston: McGraw-Hill.

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• Next ›
• Page