Teaching Unit

The general overview of my teaching unit is very positive, it worked really well. The key points that ensured this success are the experience of working with the same students as I did in practicum IV and also the methodology that I used which was more or less the same (working in groups, peer assessment, start the project with a driving question..).

Focusing on me as a teacher, I am proud of myself as this time I managed better the class, taking into account that I know the students better. Of course even I improve this item, I need to continue working on it, bearing in mind that manage fully a class requires lots of experience and hours spent with the students.

Also, what I improved doing this teaching unit are my improvising skills. In schools always happen events that you did not expect, so what you have to do is to be flexible and adapt to the situation that you have to face. That is exactly what I learnt and did, for example I reshaped a lesson that was planned for forty-five minutes into thirty minutes, I found a solution when there were only ten tablets for all the students, I was fast thinking about what the fast finishers could do, among other things.

Regarding the students, they were really engaged with the teaching unit and participate a lot. From my point of view, they were very comfortable as they knew already, from the first project that I implemented, how to work in groups, how to assess their peer groups or even how to use Google Drive and tablets.

Finally, considering the strong and weak points from this teaching unit, could be claimed the following.

On the one hand, the good points are the meaningful and contextualized way in which the unit has been designed. Students were super excited to know which was the t-shirt they are going to wear in Terra Mitica. Furthermore, the involvement of arts and crafts in the English class motivate a lot the students that are not used to be outstanding in English.

On the other hand, one of the aspects that could be enhanced or changed is the assessment. Firstly because even though I changed the peer assessment grid from the first project and I tried to keep it more simple, a large part of the students did not read all the information written in the columns from the rubric. Some students read it the first day but afterwards, the more lessons were implemented the less reading time was applied. In other words, most of the students created their own standards to give the points to their classmates and just read the titles of the items that had to be assessed. Other element that might be modified is the lack of assessment in the t-shirts designs by the teacher. Instead of only consider the students marks, as they assessed the t-shirts of their classmates, add my mark using the same grid that students had.