My micro teaching experience
On this page you've found everything on my micro teaching experience for the course of Educational Studies 1.1.
Click on what you want to visit to jump over to that part of this page.
Enjoy!
First version of my micro lesson
Since I was not that familiar with preparing lessons before this assignment, the content of the first version is not a lot. There is not much I can present from it except for the learning objectives and outcome, the "lesson plan" (which in fact is not actually a proper lesson plan), the PowerPoint that I used for this class, and the motivation behind the choices I made.
Learning objective
Students will be able to pronounce the letters in the Turkish alphabet and some basic words. They will also be able to introduce themselves.
Learning outcome
During the lesson the whole class will repeat after me while I pronounce the letters in the Turkish alphabet. Towards the end of class every student will have to introduce themselves to their partners and
Lesson Plan
[starting by speaking Turkish to grab everyone’s attention] “Merhaba arkadaşlar, dersime hoş geldiniz. Benim adım Gamze Nur ve ben size bugün Türkçenin başlangıçları öğreteceğim.”
Go on to explain that you will teach them about the basics of Turkish language.
Give a little background information on the characteristics of Turkish language.
Then practice the Turkish alphabet with the whole class.
Show some basic introduction samples and let the students practice in pairs.
Give one (extreme) example of an agglutinative word.
Show a funny video on Turkish people’s pronunciation of “Congratulations”
End the class.
Motivation about made choices
First of all, I chose this topic because it’s very close to me. I have a Turkish background and I would love to share the knowledge I have about my culture with the people in my environment. And although I do speak Turkish, I still found it somewhat challenging to put together a lesson on this topic because I mainly speak Turkish from experience at home and not by learning it in school.
I do have to admit that the preparation of my micro lesson did not quite go as planned or as I afterwards would’ve wanted. It was more of a chaotic process where I gathered bits of information that I wanted to share and by putting that together in a PowerPoint. I knew I wanted to make it an interactive class, because we know that engaging your students results in a more effective learning process (Capel, Leask & Younie, 2019 and Geerts & van Kralingen, 2018).
One thing I knew clearly from the beginning is that I needed to have a clear learning objective and to link it to a suitable learning outcome. I focused on this part of the lesson and made sure that my lesson was informative but also engaging. To add a fun element to my class I found a video on the pronunciation of Turkish people. I saw this as a way to elevate the mood after some students might feel overwhelmed by the alphabet.
The additional animations I added in the presentation is something I like to do because it shows that you as a teacher also want to put effort in the lesson and get your students as excited about it as you are. And this was my way of doing that.
Micro teaching:
Türkçe 101
Final version of my micro lesson
After gathering all the materials I first prepared for this lesson and all the feedback I received, I made an improved version of the lesson.
This time I did keep in mind that the time span is very important, so in my new lesson plan I also used the 'Lesson script' to make sure I cover everything in the right amount of time. I changed the learning objectives a bit to make it more realistic for a micro lesson. Also, I focused on just the most difficult letters to pronounce rather than all letters in the Turkish alphabet. I got rid of the longest word in the Turkish language because I felt like that didn't add much of value to this lesson. It might only make it even more confusing.
In the end, I am very content with how the lesson turned out to be and I would gladly redo this lesson with my renewed lesson plan.
Received and given feedback
I have gathered all the received feedback from my peers and put them in a Word-document. Below you can read my reflection on the lesson and the feedback and on the bottom you can find the link to the Word-document. I also wrote the main parts about what my feedback was for the micro lessons that I attended and what I learned from them.
Reflection on my lesson + feedback
After having watched the video of my micro teaching, the first thing that you notice is the length. The actual lesson takes up 33 minutes of the whole video. I believe this is the result of the fact that I didn’t use the lesson plan template in which you also have to make a lesson script and fill in the time in a detailed way. Looking back I really wished that I would’ve used that template and only stuck to the most important parts of the lesson. The part that I would have altered or removed would be the part where I go over the alphabet with the class. This by itself took up around 12 minutes of the lesson. I know, it’s shocking to me as well when I hear it. Of course there is nothing to change about it anymore, but I definitely learned from this mistake.
Besides the length of the lesson, I feel like the content was quite fun and interesting (expect for the alphabet, which was a bit too dreadful). I really enjoyed standing in front of a class and I feel like you could see that in my way of acting and my energy level. I also think that I did achieve my goal to make it an interactive class where most of the students showed some participation. The feedback I received from my peers was a lot about how I should slow down a bit while talking. I can definitely see their point as I know of myself that I can speak quickly when I’m talking about something that I am excited about. I will pay attention to this in any of my next teaching practices. Something else they mentioned was about how nice it was for me to engage the students during class. I was glad to read about this because that was exactly my intention.
Overall, I am quite happy with the feedback I have received because it challenges me to become a better teacher with every try.
Attended micro lessons
During the ES 1.1 course, I attended the micro lessons of Luca, Kim, Fabiënne, Claudia, Stephanie, Benjemin, Janick, Sean and Thi Tu Anh. I will shortly address the biggest tps and tips from those lessons.
Luca - Gender roles
Top: The originality of this topic and the way that Luca relates to it is something that was very inspiring about this class. I think this connection to your topic is very important for teaching.
Tip: Since Luca's lesson was the very first of the whole group, it was understandable that Luca showed nerves and at times didn't know how long we as the students should have time to work on the activity.Kim - Ballet
Top: The way that Kim stood in front of the class showed that she really knew her subject thoroughly and that she knew exactly what she wanted to teach.
Tip: At times she spoke a little softly which made it hard for us to hear her, but she apparently was aware of doing it more often.Fabiënne - Music and emotions
Top: Fabiënne used a range of different music fragments which is I think a nice mixup of how classes usually are given. It grabs the students' attention.
Tip: The pace in which we went through all the fragments was quite high. Because we also had to write things down, we struggled to keep up with the activity.Claudia - Catalonia
Top: This was again a very interesting topic which had a personal connection to Claudia. She is very knowledgable about the subject and was happy to teach us.
Tip: The (eye)contact with her class was a bit absent. She mostly looked at the screen while explaining and faced us when she directly asked a question to one of us.Stephanie - Drawing a face
Top: The accessibility of this course was really nice. Stephanie made sure to explain in a very simple way how to achieve a seemingly hard goal as to draw a face.
Tip: The tone and the strength of her voice could be further developed as she is sometimes not that easily heard in a classroom.Benjemin - Chess
Top: Benjemin iincluded a nice website on which he demonstrated the moves in chess and he nicely engaged us by asking a lot of questions.
Tip: Just as me, Benjemin also lost some track of time and ended up having quite a long lesson.Janick - Desertification
Top: Again with this topic you can see that Janick really connected to it and had lots to tell us. He also used quite confronting images to illustrate what is going on in the world.
Tip: Uhm... It was actually a quite good lesson! The only thing that could be improved is the nerves, but we all have those.Sean - Badminton
Top: Sean taught us about his topic in a nice and engaging way. He also brought some attributes for us to really bring the topic to live.
Tip: Just as some others had, we tend to put more information in then we have time to discuss it. So, just like Benjemin and I, Sean also used a bit much time for this lesson.Thi Tu Anh - Jeanne d'Arc
Top: Tu Anh's subject was a really interesting one and she brought the historical topic to live by showing some movie fragments. She nicely checked our comprehension by ending her lesson with a quiz.
Tip: She still can improve her speaking skills such as structure and pronunciation. Besides that she was eager to show the film fragments, but almost filled most of the class with those.