My First Full Lesson
Oct 12/20
This morning I taught my first class. It was an online class of grade 12 students at CUAM in Mexico who are preparing for the IELTS exam.
I found this class had some particular challenges when I was preparing the lesson. The first challenge was connected to the fact that the school, and the students, are based in Cancún, which had been hit by hurricane Delta. In fact, all classes had been cancelled the previous week and most of the students had spent days without power or water. Some students were still unable to attend their virtual classrooms due to ongoing problems with power or the availability of wifi. My challenge was in thinking about how the students might be feeling, or the physical conditions that they were currently living with that might provide an impediment to their learning. The second challenge was a personal one, I did not have any experience with the software platform, MS Teams, which is used for this class.
To answer the first challenge, I planned 15 minutes in my lesson to speak to the students. To give them a chance to talk about what they had been through and how things were for them now. The students seemed to be open and engaged. Almost half of the students chose to speak about how the hurricane affected them.
To answer the second challenge, I practised the night before with my daughter as a student to be able to get instant feedback on whether the student was having the experience with the material that I had planned.
The topic that I taught was the IELTS listening task #4. I used 5 minutes and 46 seconds of a TED talk by Gene Yang on how comics belong in the classroom as a lecture style listening exercise. I created questions on the content in the format of IELTS questions. I had prepared some vocabulary that I thought was challenging from the TED talk, but the students already knew most of it. The final part of my lesson was a discussion around the meaning of the content and the students’ opinions on the speakers points. There was good participation. After the lesson, I was very appreciative to get my sponsor teacher’s feedback on easier, and more effective ways of handling the MS Teams virtual environment so that I have a more definitive way to complete a formal assessment.
All in all, it was a good first class. I felt comfortable with the students and my sponsor teacher. With this group of students, I will need to make the activities more challenging.