Eighth week in my trainee placement

This week has been short too, as we had San Sebastian in the middle. I have been reflecting on my school’s policy regarding English teachers, who have to pretend they are native, and also on this trainee placement compared to the previous two.

The week has been intense, especially because after Christmas we decided that I would take over the pre-primary teacher in one 4-year-old class and one 5-year-old class. So now she watches and I perform, and we discuss afterwards. Compared to my last school placement, when I took the teacher’s place everyday, this time is different, because I hardly have any time to plan and prepare with the teacher. Last year the teacher and I went to school 45 minutes before lessons started (she used to do that, and I joined her), so we had plenty of time to plan the day and discuss. I got more directions as to how to do things. This year, we only have time for short directions on our way to class, because the teacher has other lessons before, and so do I. So, this placement is giving me a chance to work on improvising. Of course, I have read the teacher’s guide, so I know the description of each activity in the unit, but most of the times I don’t get to see how my teacher performs it before I do. This has some pros and some cons, but I think it is good learning. I know that the teacher is there, and that she will step in if she sees anything too wrong, so I feel ok with it. The experience is close to being sent to a school to take over a teacher who is on leave, which is the main work experience I am likely to get once I finish my studies.

One of the days I came out thinking that we did a fantastic lesson; my storytelling was good, children were really into it and participating a lot… Other days I saw many things that needed to be improved, mainly planning the activity itself.

Last week I had a meeting with my university supervisor for the school placement, and he suggested I wrote more about general topics, like diversity etc. So far, I have been writing about those aspects more closely related to English teaching and learning, although I have mentioned that at the end of the day, the questions that interest me the general ones: how do you create a positive learning atmosphere? what should you do with those who feel less confident? Most of the times, I have dealt with those topics in my blog, because for some strange reason I feel like those thoughts belong there, and this diary is more related to teaching English.

From what I have seen so far, English lessons can be hard for those who I called the “gourmets of education”, especially due to aspects linked with the management of time. English lessons in pre-primary last 30 minutes. In primary they are a bit longer, 45 minutes, but since we walk up to collect each group in their regular classroom, and take them back there once we finish, they end up lasting 30-35 minutes too. English teachers run on a very tight schedule. For example, in pre-primary, the material we use is planned for 45 minute lessons, and since we only have 30, we have to “compress” activities a little. If a child has a bad day and poses “problems”, often they are asked to leave the classroom. I have also seen that not all children get the highest expectations from their teacher. Am I happy with that? No. Do I have an alternative? Being just a student, I can’t claim to have a solution, but I am determined to try something else if I ever get the chance to be a “real” teacher. You can’t just give up without even trying. That attitude doesn’t match the ideal teacher I have in my head.

English classes have an extra source of diversity, compared to regular lessons, as many students attend English lessons outside school. I think we should take more advantage of that than we do, and take this information into account when we set groups in the English classroom. That way, we could make sure we apply heterogeneous grouping and encourage cooperative learning, using peer tutoring as one of the main tools to develop lessons. There is a lot to do in that area, from what I am seeing in my placement.

This trainee placement compared to the previous two

This trainee placement is very different to the previous two in several aspects. To begin with, I am doing it full time, whereas the previous two were part time. That means that before I spent three whole days at school and another two days at work every week, and I extended the duration of the school placement to complete the foreseen hours. That worked out wonderfully for me, because the three days when I went to school I had several hours after we finished at 16.30 to continue working on things related to the school placement, such as writing my diary, or preparing activities and lessons. I have to say that my second trainee placement felt way too long, especially because the university didn't allow me to start early in order to finish together with the rest of my classmates, which forced me to continue with the trainee placement until the end of june, way after our exams had finished and everybody else was enjoying their holidays. That took me to decide that it would have to be full time this time. Of course, that means that I hardly have time out of the school hours to work on my placement, which I hate, because I have to work at the same time.

Another big difference is that my previous two experiences were as a "regular" teacher trainee, and this time I am getting to see the life of the "specialist" teacher. So, before, I spent the whole day with the same group of children, and now I change every half an hour or 45 minutes. That is a considerable difference, and it is important to see if you feel comfortable with so much change. I must say that both have advantages and disadvantages, and I would be happy to try any of them as a teacher in the future.

My previous two placements were in the same school, with the same teacher and the same group of children. The pre-primary unit where I was placed was much smaller than my current school in the third placement, which is also a big difference. This larger school has more space, especially for storing and for teachers to work in, which is nice.

Finally, before I only had contact with pre-primary children, and this time I have English lessons with children aged four and five in pre-primary, and children aged six, seven and nine in primary, which is also very different.

So, altogether I think I will get a quite global view on teaching in pre-primary and primary, which is great.

Pretending to be a native teacher in the EFL classroom

English teachers at the school where I am having my trainee placement pretend to be native English speakers. My school supervisor told me about it when we first met last summer. When she told me, I didn't think anything about it. Later on, when the new academic year started, we were told by some of our teachers in the Foreign Language Learning and Teaching Minor that that wasn't a good policy, mainly because it set a bad example regarding multilingualism, as students would have a monolingual English teacher, who apparently made no effort to learn other languages, while they had to learn English.

On December 3rd, when we celebrate the day of Basque language and culture, children put up a show at school; some classes sang a song, others made cookies etc. The 4th graders whose lessons I have been attending all along sang a well known song that challenges the listener to speak Basque, and starts saying something like "We speak Basque, why don't you join us?". Well, that morning, when the teacher and myself went to pick them up and take them to the English classroom downstairs, children sang the song pointing at us, and they had every reason to do so too. So, yes, pretending to be a native English teacher who doesn't speak Basque in a Basque school is not a good idea.

There are even more drawbacks to this policy. For instance, it makes it impossible to share with the students the struggles the teacher went through to learn English, which is something that helps create a good atmosphere and is encouraging for students. Equally, the teacher won't be able to share how they overcame those hurdles and show how far they got, setting an example. On the other hand, raising metalinguistic awareness pointing out similarities and differences between English and the students' L1 or L2 is prevented also. And, then, it creates awkward situations, where the English teacher can't speak with any student's parents in front of them, unless they do it in English, nor can they speak with the rest of the school staff in any other language but English. Finally, if the English teacher gets caught speaking Basque or Spanish students will feel cheated at and a bit stupid for having believed the teacher, which won't help create a relationship based on trust and respect.

The English teacher should be able to make students understand and accept that the English lesson and/or classroom is a place and time for English only, without cheating and lying.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Stacks of articles arranged by topics, books, computer... that is my week-end life during the months of writing the dissertation.

Hop on the roller-coaster!

Remember I said that maybe an undergraduate dissertation was not going to be tough or long enough to feel like walking through a desert? Well, guess what, I was wrong!!

It's a good thing I wrote about how happy I was with how things were coming out and how hard I had worked over Christmas on Thursday morning, because I turned upside down that very same afternoon, after I received a message from my trainee placement supervisor telling me that I was missing some fundamental points and sending me some relevant literature which made my knees tremble, because the minute I read the abstracts I knew they were those kind of articles where I can only get a grasp of maybe 20% of what is being said.

That takes me to an interesting point as a teacher trainee, as I got to experience myself the kind of feeling that children can sometimes have if you don't plan your lessons properly: plain stupidity. I don't mean ignorance, which is ok. Knowing yourself ignorant is normal; there are so many things to learn in the world and in life that nobody can be expected to know them all, and if you walk out of your comfort zone you are bound to feel ignorant. As a teacher, you can help students use this self-consciousness about ignorance as a pole to learn, instead of a spade to dig their self-esteem in deep hole.

But feeling stupid is quite something else; that's the kind of feeling you get when you are put in a position where what you are expected to understand or to learn is way ahead of you, when the gap between what you already know and what you intend to learn is simply too big and you don't find enough help around you to bridge it. During the degree we have learnt the technical terms related to these questions (zone of proximal development, scaffolding), as well as some of their deeper implications, but the basic idea can be explained in plain words.

During the degree, I have come to realise that teachers know a bit about many fields (psychology, sociology, linguistics etc.) and they apply that knowledge to real situations of learning and teaching in a school. Knowing just a bit about those subjects means that they can only go so far into the details of each field, or they need to take some time to study them in more depth before going any further. That is where the readings that help bridge the gap come in so handy, otherwise you just get caught up in jargon.

Coming back to my roller-coaster of emotions related to the dissertation, it has given me an opportunity to laugh at myself a bit and to reflect on what will most probably happen when I defend my dissertation in front of the committee in some months. My work will be read by (I think) three of our lecturers, who are experts in their fields, and they are bound to ask questions and make remarks based on their knowledge, which I lack. So, I'll have to bear in mind that the purpose of the whole thing will be for me to know what I know about and what I am ignorant about, just that.

And one last thing about this final idea: I have seen that in some other universities, the poster sessions on undergraduate dissertations are held weeks before the written report is to be submitted. In my opinion, that makes a lot of sense, especially from the point of view of assessment. Having the oral defense and poster session in the end, weeks after the written report has been handed in actually turns these two tasks into final assessment tools, whereas if the poster session is held during the process of producing the dissertation, it fits much better in the continuous assessment we are supposed to have. That would also help improve our work, as we would get very useful feedback on our work in a moment when we can actually still change things.

Working on my undergraduate dissertation over Christmas

I am really happy with all I managed to get done over Christmas on my undergraduate dissertation. I did an awful lot of reading, and quite a lot of writing too, so the objectives I set before the holidays were met. I kept the writing as concise as I could, because I want to leave space for extending on those aspects that will be more important regarding the empirical part of the work, which I have outlined, but not fully developed yet.

As a result, I have a draft with the final structure of the document, and some sections have a large part of the contents already written. Not all that needs to go in has been written yet, but all that has been written is there to stay (with minor changes, of course).

Meanwhile, I continue gathering more and more literature, which is something that will eventually need to stop, because I won't have time to go over all of it. The problem is that the more I go into details, the more I feel I need to know, so I continue searching, and when you search, you always find interesting things. For instance, I plan on doing a storytelling and assessing the listening comprehension in students. Then, of course, I realise that my choice of questions will need to be well justified, so I begin to look for information on how to assess listening comprehension, which is not the topic of my dissertation, but nevertheless I need to have a fair idea on it. Everything I think about leads me to the need to know more about other related topics, which takes me to more and more readings, even if I think I have narrowed down the topic of my dissertation. I don't know, maybe I am doing something wrong; or maybe that is the way it should be.

Anyway, at the end of the day, this is an undergraduate dissertation, mainly a chance for me to learn, and not so much to prove that I know thoroughly my way around researching and the scientific method. I am learning a lot of things, so I think I am heading in the right direction, and hopefully with the help of my supervisors for the dissertation and the school placement I'll get there.

Seventh week in my school placement

This week is being quite different from the previous ones.

Firstly, I learnt the stories for the two pre-primary grades, HH4 (Don’t cry) and HH5 (The hamster), and I have started performing them in class. The first I did was the hamster, and it was alright, although I had a few mistakes; I didn’t know that this time I had to say the dialogues in such a way that students would be able to repeat them after me, so I didn’t leave enough space for them to talk, and when the little boy went to the pet shop to buy the hamster, I forgot to play the part when he pays for it! Other than that, it was ok.

The next day I told the HH4 story, and this time I did leave time for them to repeat the dialogues, although they didn’t repeat much. They were quite engaged and followed the story with interest, so I was happy. I also did the finger puppet dialogues we usually so as an opening and closing routine for each lesson, but I do those quite often, so that wasn’t much of a novelty. I also went to an HH4 group that I had never been with before to tell them the story, invited by my supervisor in the school, which was great. She told me that stories come out better as you practise, and she was absolutely right.

Since I was feeling more confident and freer to take active part, I proposed to my supervisor (the one that teaches only in pre-primary) to change slightly the opening puppet dialogue where a child asks for permission to go to the toilet. As we have done it so far, the student wants a wee, but since the hamster’s story has introduced the concept of poo (the hamster poos around the house), we changed the dialogue so the student would say he/she wants to poo.

Secondly, yesterday I took over my supervisor in the HH4 lesson, as she had to go out. I found out just in the morning that I would be doing the lesson on my own, so there wasn’t time for any preparation, but it was ok. I just needed to do the opening and closing rituals, which I know by heart by now, and run an activity where children had to draw the heads of the two characters of the story, cut them, fold them and glue them to make two puppets. They did similar puppets in the previous story, so they knew pretty much what to do.

As usual, the most difficult part was to manage the group. I took advantage of them being peacefully sitting in a circle when I arrived, as their “regular” teacher was still around, and I started straight away with the opening ritual. I find that leaving no time for children to be idle while they are sitting in the circle is a good idea, because otherwise they start to look for something to do which seems interesting to them, and that usually goes against the teacher’s interest. After the opening finger puppet dialogue, I introduced the activity, and I am happy of the way I did that too, as I got a couple of them to produce some output as well, so it was ok. I did make a mistake, though: I didn’t stress that they had to draw the heads first, then fold the paper, then cut, and then glue.  As a result, when I gave out the printed sheet to each student and they went to their desks, some of them started cutting first, and once they were concentrated on their activity it was hard for me to get their attention and explain that it was drawing first, and cutting afterwards. I should have made sure that all instructions were given before handing out the sheets. It wasn’t that bad, because it didn’t really matter that much if they cut them first, as we were going to have time to finish them that day, but it is something to bear in mind for the next time. Giving clear instructions seems very easy and straightforward, but it isn’t, for me at least.

Another little problem that arose during the lesson, which was entirely caused by my lack of good planning, was that some children finished much earlier than others making their puppets, and I had no other activity to offer them. I couldn’t ask them to sit in the circle still for another ten minutes while others finished, so I let them wander in the classroom. They engaged in very positive activities, such as taking the puzzles out and doing them, but when the rest finished and I wanted them to sit back in the circle to do the closing routine, of course, they didn’t want to, and I don’t blame them. Nothing too bad happened; just one little girl who got angry and refused to sit with the rest of us for the closing finger puppet dialogue. It didn’t worry me, because she does very well, so not taking part in the puppet dialogue once was not going to harm her at all, but it made me think about the incident afterwards.

I would need to have an alternative activity to offer to children who finish activities early, so they have something else to do. Then again, I thought that it would be a good idea to take advantage of the skills of those who finish first to teach their peers, so that was something that I could do the next time. My supervisor has just told me that that is something she does, as well as playing the song that goes along with the story and asking them to dance freely while they listen to it.

So, those were the main learnings that I got out of yesterday’s experience.

Finally, I came to the conclusion that it was the right moment to change my schedule. When I first started the school placement, I had in mind to change the schedule after Christmas, so I could concentrate on some grades only, and take more active part in the lessons. Seeing that I am taking more active part in the pre-primary lessons now, I have proposed to both of my school supervisors to stop attending the 1st and 2nd primary classes, and concentrate on the two pre-primary grades, plus primary 4th. That way, I will be able to take part in the same lesson with different groups of pre-primary, so I can watch how my supervisor does it and then do it myself with another group. They have both accepted, so from next week on, I will start with the new timetable.

I also plan on asking my pre-primary supervisor to let me lead all the lessons in the two HH4 and HH5 groups that I have been following since the beginning. It is much easier to lead the pre-primary lessons than the primary lessons without knowing the lesson-plan in depth, because their structure is much simpler and stays the same from one unit to the next, while primary lessons are more diverse in their contents, and I couldn’t take over the teacher without very thorough explanations beforehand, for which we have no time, unfortunately.

Well, since I have gone long enough for this week, I will leave the topic I want to build upon for next week.

Sixth week of my school placement

This first week of the second term is very short, as it started on a Wednesday. I guess that is good for all of us, teachers, students and trainees, because it will give us the chance to enjoy a soft landing into the new year, as it were.

I was curious to see if the English teachers in my school intended to start with the regular contents straight away, or they planned to have a first transitional lesson. Both of them told me that they were going to continue with the usual lessons for several reasons: in pre-primary, children lack the communication skills required to talk in English about their holidays; in primary, they had plenty of days before Christmas when they did other activities and, besides, they already talk about Christmas in their regular classrooms, so the teacher sees no point in repeating the same conversations in the English lesson.

I also think that it is good to enter into full school-mode as soon as possible once the holidays are over. Maybe you can have a special warmer at the beginning, but other than that, going back to a known routine helps us all to focus.

This week we started with the new stories in LH1 and HH4. I loved the way the teacher performed the LH1 story with all students in a semicircle dramatizing it at the same time. They enjoyed it a lot, and the teacher did it very well, using gestures, intonation and speaking very clearly.

Having a chance to see how stories are first told has made me realise that it is hard for the teacher, who needs to memorise the exact words of a quite long narration. It is all right for a teacher who holds a permanent position, because it will be challenging on the first year, but if you are a teacher who just arrived on that day to school to take over a teacher who is on leave, it seems impossible to be able to follow the lesson as it has been designed. That is a great problem I see in this method, and there is no easy way around. I would like to build up on this topic next week, as I feel that it might have some negative side-effects for the teacher.