Self Evaluation 2

The Time Management Issue

For my second official presentation with the 5th grade classroom, I was supposed to cover a grammar subject- namely “going to”. While I was thinking about how to teach this subject to my students, I decided that I would not make a lesson based on grammar explanation. That is what has been taught to us for four years. We should not write grammar rules of formulas on the board and then expect our students to understand them without any context or guidance. The first thing we need to do is to present the context for the use of that particular structure, and help the students understand what kind of space in the meaning that structure actually fills.

In my presentation, I tried to apply this idea to the classroom. However, because there was no explicit reference to “going to” throughout my presentation, the students sometimes used it in their production and sometimes did not. They knew other structures which could be used instead of “going to” and they were successful in using them. I am not so sure whether I should have restricted my students to convey their meaning across using “going to.” However, I think that this did not constitute a problem as the students were actually able to grasp the use of this structure in the lesson.

Another problem I came across was the time management issue. I believe that most of us have this problem as we are novice teachers and we cannot foresee how the lesson we planned will progress in a real classroom environment. Regarding my lesson plan, I thought that it would take a full hour or maybe it could exceed the time limit. However, the reality was not like that. In the classroom, the activities progressed really fast and I was shocked when I looked at the clock to see that I still have a lot of time until the end of my lesson. This can be due to the fact that I was too fast at the beginning of the lesson as a result of stress and nervousness. However, I fortunately had an extra activity in my mind which saved the day. I asked the students about their own holiday plans for the summer and I closed the lesson with this discussion.

To conclude, I can say that it is a must to have an extra activity in mind when you are not sure whether your lesson plan will take that much time or not. Experiencing this in a real classroom, I will always keep preparing an extra for all my classes from now on. I advise this to all my teacher candidate friends as well. Being completely blank at that moment and not knowing what to do could result in a classroom disaster. Being prepared is always better than leaving the lesson to its fate.