Evaluation Of Teaching

Component 3, Assignment 1
Evaluation of teaching
by
Wilfrido Dennis González Romero

The purpose of this essay is to reflect and improve my own teaching practice. In order to achieve this first of all a description of the lesson taught and a description of the group is given, after that I will mention the positive aspects or the aspects that were successful of the lessonI taught, followed by the aspects which I need to improve in order to become a better teacher. At the end I will go over to concrete and necessary actions to be followed in order to be more effective as a teacher.
The lesson was taught early in the morning to a group of 3rd grade high school students, there are 20 students in this class. They have an intermediate B1 level, It isimportant to mention in this school during the English classes the groups are split. (As a matter of fact I do not know why is this, I guess I t could be for sake of differentiated learning, but seems the ones who are benefited more from this are the students in the advanced class. I am under the impression that the students who are not advanced, have been alwaysunderestimated.) Students from this group do not talk very often, they are afraid to talk, but their Grammar knowledge and listening skills are well developed and are the expected according to the level they have.
I am not very used to teach to these level, I have always been in charge of teaching upper intermediate students, so being the teacher of this group has been for this and otherreasons challenging to me.
The lesson started on time, went smooth and the students showed willing to cooperate and to talk, IT is very difficult to me make this happen, but surprisingly it happened!
There were also moment of the lesson which things didn´t go very well, but I will talk about this later.
First of all I have to say one of the reasons I got unexpected resultswith my students are I treated them different from the previous teacher, as Scrivener (1994) says: “learners are intelligent fully-functioning humans, not simply receptacles for passed-on knowledge.” The whole person is involved and the whole person itself is fully capable. I noticed previous teachers did not use English as the classroom language just because they thought doing itwill be highly difficult for the students, with this kind of ideas no wonders why the students find so hard to speak in English.
I am asked by my coordinator to give priority to the book and answering, sometimes it seems to be the most important part of my job rather than helping learners to develop their skills, and to be honest I sometimes prefer just to stick to what thebook says, it is of course more comfortable but also more boring for everybody, but when I take my time of planning and considering not just the number of pages to be answered but the real needs of my students like in this case I struggle less with my students, their attentions is better, they understand the target language better, after all and quoting Davies (2000) “A cousebookcannot have a personal relationship with learners, only the teacher can project, can respond sensitively to learners, and make learning a personal, enjoyable, and satisfying activity.”
I could keep talking about all the wonderful things that happened in this lesson, how much I enjoyed teaching it and the great time I had with my students, but that would mean being too much self indulgent.Rather than that I am afraid it is time to face the things that did not go so well.
I have always had problems planning, not only my English lessons but some other aspects in my life, once again I realize about the importance of formal planning, even though there was material selected, the target language was well studied by me before teaching it and had a lesson plan to...