Today, I taught alongside a fellow colleague with the topic being “hobbies.” Students were late coming to the LLC, which caused some time management issues. Perhaps my colleague and I could’ve worked on assessing what activities we need to skip if time was in a crunch. Technical issues were limited as it worked because my colleague and myself communicated with one another about the possibilities (if she left the LLC BBB for some reason) beforehand. For discussions and break-out rooms, we were able to depend on helpers like our Sponsor teacher and TA to guide other room discussions when it required three rooms instead of two. For this added benefit, it promoted interactiveness while maintaing controlled learning environment. Takeaway: Dependence

Thinking back on the experience, there were a couple of amendments that should be fixed. One, the pacing was done well, but I felt a bit rushed at certain moments. During my delivery, I chose to repeat instructions twice hoping the students listened carefully. Even if they didn’t have many instructions on the screen, they formulated further instructions themselves (boosting listening competency). From our sponsor teacher, she mentioned that pacing also included the notion of ‘keep it moving’. It’s important to give a moment to wait for a response, but it is short wait. If the wait time takes five minutes, the instructor must move on. She advised us to create immediate prompts (through reaction). Students usually wait for others to speak. If no one speaks, they won’t neither. It made me think, “maybe I should create immediate Q&A to make sure class time is used well.” Takeaway: Participation Encouragement

Secondly, assumptions are crucial too. If an instructor assumes the learners know all the jargon and idioms, the lesson may not go as planned. Being in a predominant level 1/2 classroom, students needed familiarity and repetition. Without the two, the learning were affected, and along with their understandings of the class content. An example of how this amendment was needed, our sponsor teacher used a word like ‘position’ to comment on a student’s reply. And for the student, he/she didn’t know what the word meant. This needed further explanation, and our sponsor teacher had to veto her own question. She commented in our briefing session that we must keep track of what words to use, and inappropriate word-choice might create unnecessary explanations. For her, ‘position’ appeared like a familiar word, but apparently not to the learners. Takeaway: Word Relevancy

Concluding the session, I found that importance is not about how we as students or teacher get graded; importance is comprehension mistakes that’s the biggest takeaway instead. Ability to take constructive criticism is key and knowing to change for a better experiential learning environment for those in your class.

The following are the slides that we used for our lesson. Given by our Sponsor Teacher.