Self-evaluation 3

This blog entry is about my third self-evaluation.

A) MY CHALLENGES/ AIMS FOR THE FUTURE

      There are a few areas in teaching that I still have to improve.

     First, I need to develop my skills connected with maintaining discipline in the classroom. On my internship, I have learned a few ways of keeping order during the lessons, but I still think that it is not enough. 

     Second, I know that I need to work on giving instructions. Sometimes I forget about giving instructions before distributing tasks and because of that children often do not know what to do. Furthermore, my instructions are sometimes too complicated for small kids and because of that, they have problems with understanding them. 

     The third thing that I would like to improve is my relationships with pupils. I still do not remember the names of my students from practice. Because of my poor knowledge about those kids I had problems with organizing group work, I had no idea how to mix them in groups because I did not know who can work with whom. I needed to talk with teachers about students to get to know them better. I understand that to build a good relationship with children we need to spend more time with pupils and it is difficult to do when we teach kids only once a week. However, I hope that if I have my own pupils in the future, I will be able to build excellent relationships with them.

     The last thing for now that I would like to improve is assessment. I think that I need to use more self-assessment and peer - assessment. Thanks to self-assessment children are aware of progress in their learning process, and also they know what they still need to improve and peer- assessment shows kids that they can get feedback not only from a teacher but also form their colleagues. These two types of assessments make students more involved in their learning.

     In order to improve I still need a lot of practice. I hope that in the next semester I will be able to try different methods of assessment and keeping discipline. After each lesson, I would like to try to give children self-assessment worksheets. Also, I need to read a lot about giving instructions and learn how to simplify them. Perhaps I need to start using more body language to make them more understandable for children. I believe that on my next internship I will also have such a fantastic and helpful mentor teacher, that will give me lots of helpful tips connected with my teaching. 

B) FINAL CONCLUSIONS

     I think that during my internships, I did all the tasks that I had to do, as best as I could. What went well is that I was able to prepare all the lessons by myself, especially CLIL lessons. It was not an easy task because I had never done it before. On each lesson, I managed to do all the planned tasks. Children enjoyed it very much, especially when they were making sculptures from recycled materials. Art presents fantastic opportunities for discussion, focused language work and skills-based activities. Thanks to this topic children could share their opinions and ideas about different works of art, and during that, they practice speaking in English.

     The only thing that I would do differently was that lesson with making sculptures. Children had a lot of ideas and fun while they were making them, but unfortunately, in that lesson, they were using too much of the Polish language. When they were answering my questions, they used English, but when they were talking with each other they frequently used the Polish language. I know that they were excited and that it was easier for them to speak in their native language, but I should have done something more than just saying them to stop using Polish. In that time, they did not listen to me, because they were so involved in their works that the whole world around them, stopped existing.

     I am particularly proud of finding solutions to my problem with organizing group work. In the beginning, I allowed children to choose their groups, because of that I had problems with discipline, during group work and also in almost every group, only one child did something and others did not do anything. To get rid of that problem, I started using cards with different colours to divide children into groups. Another thing was that I started dividing tasks in different ways. Each child in a group had a different task. For example, when they were describing pictures in groups, each child had to focus on a different part of the picture. Thanks to this, all students were responsible for the work of their groups. To fulfil one task, each child in a group needed to work. 

     As you may see, I have learned a lot during this internship, but there are still a few things that I need to improve, and I hope that the next internship will give me that opportunity.