Self- Reflection

My Old Me

I enrolled in this program with an immense passion on learning how to become a Spanish teacher. At the beginning, I had a general idea about teaching that involve rules:

1. Be proficient in the language I am about to teach.

2. Plan lessons around cultural facts.

3. Encourage students to read.

                                   What changed my thinking?

Been exposed to many resources related to teaching changed completely my perspective about it. What seems easy at the beginning, start to take a different shape. There are many parts that makes up the whole picture of teaching a world language, and that does not rely only in knowing the language and its culture. Let me put it this way, teaching a world language is like putting a puzzle together. Before to lead a classroom, I needed to learn how to organize learning for students. ACTFL and the state standards, SLA research, and communicative approach among others recycled my idea about teaching and prepared me to add more value to create a wonderful learning experience for my future students.

Field experience

I had the opportunity to practice and apply all what I learned in real classrooms. Field placement experiences shaped my way of thinking about teaching even better. I observed how teaching occur in real time, how the use of technology is applied in classroom, ways to manage classroom and minimize distractions, the use of realia to enhance lessons, interpersonal interactions between teacher and students, how questions are asked and how feedback among others. I also had the opportunity to lead a classroom during my field placement. I believe that I experienced the same feelings as every novice teacher, anxiety and/or shyness among others. However, more practices gave me the confidence that I needed, and helped me find my way in controlling and leading a classroom.

My Takeaway

I know that I learned so much from these experiences, I came to understand how to combine both theory and practice together.  Planning interactive, and engaging lessons becomes one of my favorite hobby’s. Engaging students in their learning experience becomes my major focus However, I know that is hard to teach everything I plan because every class is different. That is why reflection and adjusting lessons becomes my everyday practice. I learned how to pace myself when I am using the target language as well as I learned how to use simple Spanish words and expression to make the content comprehensible for students with lower level of proficiency. I also learned how to make a script of how I am going to deliver the lesson, I prepare my questions before hand and practice my teacher voice. In addition, I learned how to accommodate differentiated learners, and how to integrate new ways to make all students welcome in my classroom. It has been a wonderful experience and I am glad that it is only the beginning of a promising journey.

Moving forward

While reflecting in my teaching, I believe that I still need to work on pacing myself while delivering the lessons to lower proficiency levels specially the novice low. I also believe that I need to learn how to formulate better questions using simple language patterns to help students understand and participate better during the activities. Consequently, I need to work more on how to give better instructions, I plan to write previous scripts and practice it before to be in front of students. Other think that I need to do is to learn and practice the different ways that I can give feedback to students. I believe that it is very important to give them constructive feedback that will help them evaluate, reflect about their work, and being part of their learning experience. I believe that students need to have some agency in managing their learning.