Week 12 Reflections: Back on top

At the beginning of this course I was very excited at the prospect of learning all these new techniques that I could apply to my own teaching. I started implementing some of these techniques into my own classroom discourse and I could see the potential value that they had in my student's learning progress. My classroom was slowly becoming less about me and more about my students. It felt really great to reduce my t-talk and increase the s-talk. My supervisor had even noticed that my class was speaking more English. I was trying hard to make sure that all the input that I presented to my students was comprehensible by incorporating all of the MIC techniques that I had learnt in my methodology class.Everything was going well and then......

Then slowly my frustrations started to build.  The amount of tasks that needed to be completed at work just kept getting bigger. For a while I didn't even have time to sit down and think about lesson planning for my own classes. Unlike public school, where they have the chance to refine their plans because they get to teach the same lessons several times in a week, I never a had this opportunity since I work at an academy. I teach every lesson once and barely have the time to reflect on it that i'm teaching a new one. This has been the biggest frustration of all. On top of that, I was really stressed over the classroom management issues that were happening in one of my classes. I am happy to say that since one the students has quit our program things are going much smoother.

I knew when I signed up for this course that it was going to be a challenge. Trying to keep two jobs and do all of my homework was no problem at first but then I started to slack on my homework and my projects. Since I am the queen of procrastination, I would wait until the last minute to finish all of my work.I would skim through the articles just enough to answer the questions and then I would forget about all of it. Well last week was a rude awakening when I got my meth assignment back and I realized how poorly I had done. After class I though about how I could rectify this problem. Well, instead of waking up on Sunday and forcing myself to start my homework, I went for a three hour hike with my husband up to Namsan tower. Apparently it's just what I needed to get over this bump in the road. Over the past few weeks I had forgotten to take time for myself  to reflect about what was happening in all aspects of my life.

On Sunday I decided to set a goal for the upcoming week. My goal was to give more descriptive feedback instead of evaluative feedback. Since I started teaching children about six years ago I never even thought about descriptive feedback until I learnt about it in this class. Saying things like good job, excellent and good answer have always been my go to expressions. It's really hard to break habits.

Monday morning, I went to class with this in mind. During my morning warm up routine I started asking my students what they had done on the weekend.  Instead of just saying 'great or that's nice' when my student said he had gone to the restaurant with his family and then move on to the others. I started asking other questions like: What kind of restaurant did you go to? and What kind of food did you eat? and to my surprise other students started responding as well. One kid said "Teacher I also like meat." I mean it makes
perfect senses that f you engage your students you will get a response but I find it very hard to break old habits. I will continue making an effort because the outcome is just fantastic.

I feel much more positive about this whole experience compared to a few weeks ago. Look at me I even posted my reflection on Wednesday rather than late Friday night!!