Teaching Experience

Today we had a class of 6 graders as guests in our classroom. We had to teach them a topic of choice in 3 groups. The first group was ITEP students and the other two were ERASMUS.

We started with the teachers leaving the classroom, because the pupils knew them very well. The topic of the group was, “Fastelavn”, the Danish version of Mardi Gras as it was celebrated a few days ago. Couple students were selected to translate the teachers’ talk and instructions if some of pupils didn’t understand. Most of the students were involved in the discussion and the class ended with the group discussions of each teachers’ nations’ respective version of ‘Fastelavn’ excluding Scotland because they didn’t it. Overall it was a entertaining class, the costumes worn by the teachers added a fun layer to the class.

The second class had the topic of countries’ of the teachers. It started with forming of the groups. The abundance of personal traits and features that the groups were based on made me think that it was going to be a chaos. But the pupils did a good job of communicating and finding the group that they belong. It was nice to see that pupils could act on their own, but it could be better to control the process in order to prevent the possible chaotic situation. Again, the class ended with a group discussion about the teachers’ countries.

I was in the third and last group. This was going to be my first teaching experience and to be honest I was terrified. We started the class with a hangman game with the words of ‘all about me’ and ‘interview’. After we introduced ourselves and our topics, pupils had to interview each other and talk about themselves in pairs, and to fill out a worksheet about their pair. There were three different worksheets the pupils could choose from depending on their level of English. After the ‘workshop’ session we followed a similar path to the previous groups and each of us set in one of the 4 groups of pupils and let them interview us and talk with them. We ended the class with a game in the school yard where we formed a circle and used a tennis ball to draw to the person that we wanted to ask a question. Overall I think we did a good job of involving everyone in the class with the games and interviews. The topic also was a great way to get the pupils attention as everyone likes to talk about the things they like.

For me, kids being eager to share their thoughts and ask questions made the process of the teaching easier. While I didn’t interact with the whole class as one of my classmates mentioned, it was a good first teaching experience, because I got to work with my group of pupils and see that they were very active.