TESL 0170: Teaching Journal and Self-Evaluation

I taught Reading Strategies II for 10 hours and today was my last day of teaching. In this class I taught vocabulary and different reading strategies such as identifying main ideas and supporting details. It was a great experience for me to learn more about teaching, and also recognize my strength and weaknesses as a teacher.

Your strengths as a teacher:

From my experience and the feedback that I received from my sponsor teacher, I found that I did very well in building a rapport with students. I tried to create a very friendly atmosphere, so that students feel more relaxed when working on the activities and giving answers. I tried to make more opportunities for them to talk more with friendly conversations and sometimes maked jokes to build friendship. They were very comfortable when I started teaching them and asked me questions and responded to my questions very well.

I think my voice was loud enough and clear for students. I tried to speak in pace and slower to make it easier for students to follow the instructions.

Another thing that I discovered from my teaching experience is that I am good at planning a lesson and preparing materials. Every session after teaching, I looked for materials and activities that I could add to my lesson for the next class. For presenting new materials, I created PowerPoints with pictures and examples to make the new lesson clearer and more understandable for students.

Areas for improvement:

Through this experience I found that I still have a lot to learn and improve. The most prominent area was building group activities. I found that I need to learn more games and group activities suitable for ESL students. Although I tried to provide group activities and games, there were still more needs for that. I think in order to make the class more active and interesting; the teacher should know a lot of activities and games. I think playing games is a great asset in ESL classroom. I found some good resources, and also my sponsor teacher introduced me a great resource to incorporate more group activities into the classroom. I also need to work more on how to encourage quiet students to participate.

Your focus for the future:

My focus for the future is gain more teaching experience by working as an ESL volunteer. Volunteering is a great opportunity to learn more about students and their needs and how to provide materials for each level of students. I also will try to find more resources and study more about teaching ESL to increase my knowledge.

Your reflections on the students' evaluation:

The feedback that I got from students was positive and good. They mentioned that they understood my lessons and the lessons were very clear for them. They have learned about each subject in every class and they liked the activities. One of them mentioned that it would be better to have more group activity. Overall, their feedback was good, and my teaching was satisfactory for them.