Final reflection of the subject: Practicum III

After finishing the subject, I must confess that at the beginning I was very excited about it. Teaching English at a school was one of my dreams, one of the most important parts of my teaching degree. Therefore, the subject Practicum III has helped me to reaffirm this value and has also given me the opportunity to know better how to teach English in a classroom. Now that I have finished, I can strongly confirm what I first thought: It has been an amazing experience for my personal and academic growth.

I really believe that teachers always need to be studying and improving their knowledge, and during this school placement, as I had supposed before starting, I had learned much more than I expected.

I was completely interested in learning the previous organization that an English teacher must have. Fortunately, I had been able to know how an appropriate lesson has to be planned, and how you need to modify what you had planned, depending on the rhythm of the class and the situation that you find when you start the lesson. I have checked that this is hard work, and that a teacher needs a lot of time to get ready before starting a lesson.

However, I have not been able to see strategies to keep students motivated. I have to say that combining different type of activities is a good way to make them pay attention; but in general, I felt that students did not like the English language. From my personal point of view, it is very sad, and I really think that this students’ perception could have been changed into a better one. If I were the teacher, I would have shown them real situations where they can need the language, because I detected that they didn’t enjoy the lessons because they thought this language was useless. Probably, I would have use English song’s lyrics or English videos of some famous people to create the necessity to understand the language: a real learning situation. Another option would have been to establish CLIL lessons, because in my opinion, teaching a subject through a foreign language has the potential to increase motivation and success for learners.

Regarding on what I brought to the school from my personal experience, I must confess that I did my best on helping the specialist as well as all the other members of the school: I felt surprised when they asked me to design the costumes of carnival of first and second grade, as well as the lesson to create the costumes. I took advantage of what I had learnt during my camp stuff course. What’s more, I also gave to the English specialist some ideas about how to motivate the eldest students with the topic “London”, and I brought some Pounds and some pictures about my travel to the city. In addition, I also helped a teacher to create an online newspaper, by sending her some useful tools that I found. Finally, I also share my knowledge acquired at University: on the one hand, I showed my “English Scrapbook” (done with Theresa Zanatta on the subject Didàctica de la Llengua Anglesa) to all the English specialists, who were very grateful and made copies of it. On the other hand, I explained to the head teacher and other teachers how to use the Symbaloo tool in order to organize the most useful links of the school, and I helped them to create a Symbaloo page for the school.

For all of those reasons, I can be very proud about what I offered to the school, but I have to be very thankful to all the teachers, because from the first day they received me with open arms, and I felt really comfortable to do all those interventions at the school.

Finally, I must confess that I have designed my unit taking into account a lot of useful strategies that Theresa Zanatta and Neus Figueras had taught to me during the first semester. I knew that all I had learnt was going to be really useful, but in fact it has been essential to develop my unit. Furthermore, I have tried to do it in a fun and effective way, using meaningful resources and always bearing in mind the individual needs.

To conclude this final reflection, and according with what I wrote on my letter of intent, I would like to highline the personal interest that I had on seeing a CLIL lesson. Unfortunately, the school didn’t use this methodology, so I was not able to participate or to see it. This fact has made me become even more interested on this methodology. For that reason, now I am thinking on enrolling on a CLIL course for teachers after finishing my degree. Probably, if I had seen a CLIL lesson in my school placement and I hadn’t liked it, this curiosity that I current have would have disappeared.

All in all, this subject has helped me to complete a formation to become an English teacher, and I must recognise that I would have liked to stay a longer period at school: I had the sensation that I was learning something new every day, that’s why I felt so sad when the last day arrived. Anyway, I had had the opportunity to find out how my job is going to be, and I have seen a very nice example of how to be an English teacher.