Our very last day - lesson planning (session 16)

Planning a lesson seems like a tricky thing to me.
You need to think of so many small details: what activities to include, how to arrange the classroom, in what order the activities should go, what the aim of the lesson is, what is the purpose of doing this and not that. The most scary scenarios may come to your mind: what if the technology fails? what if the students don’t like the lesson? what if it doesn´t satisfy their needs?

These small things keep running through your head when you are trying to create a perfect lesson plan. It is even more challenging when 7 people have to cooperate and create one perfect lesson. Fortunately, in my group there are really nice people and it is a pleasure to work with them. :-)

I am really looking forward to our first lesson and I hope our students will enjoy it as well.  

Day Four: Moodle

Moodle - Day 4

Although this was the last session of the day, we were really excited about it. We were told how to use this platform and felt really proud that we are becoming technophiles. We created a layout for our e-learning course and came up with a name for it. Our group chose "Freaky Friday". So, let's get it started.

Day Four: Session 14

On Thursday after lunch, we all gathered to mark the tests written and created (probably a better word for describing the posters) by our future-students. First we all put ourselves in their shoes and took the placement test - not as easy as one would have imagined, but we put our heads together and made it through! Then, the easier part of the marking followed, as we were supposed to compare the students' tests to the correct answers. Nevertheless, the trickiest part of the session was getting closer. After finishing the correction of the tests, we moved on to the written tasks. We were to work in pairs and to try to agree on the number of points we were going to give the students for various aspects of their performance. That might be a difficult task sometimes, however Maruška and I turned out to be on the same page most of the time and when some minor differences appeared in our suggestions, we were always able to reach a compromise with no difficulties. We especially liked the posters which were often very funny and carefully carried out! Moreover, it was quite interesting (QI! Do you know the show? I love it! Stephen Fry! ..sorry, couldn't help it..) to watch the difference between the number of points given to the same student for his/her letter and the points he/she obtained for his/her poster.

Day Four: Testing students

How many of you thought that this lesson will be theoretical before James made it clear? I am sure I was not the only one, who was a little bit shocked. However I was very excited to meet our potential students, because until then I had no idea what to expect. The timetable of the exam was quite confusing and some of the students-to-be were sent to wrong classrooms, but in the end we made it work. Props to us! :) The oral part of the exam was my favourite, because we got to meet our student in person and most of them exceeded my expectations. We were told that most of them will be elementary to intermediate, however some of them spoke quite fluently and effortlessly. I am looking forward to meeting at least some of them in our course!

Day Three: Teaching Pronunciation Picture Story (session 12)

As soon as we finished our mock course map with James which was really interesting and totally new for the majority of us,

 

Nikki came into the classroom. At the beginning, she wanted to play hangman, but...sorry to say that, but we obviously did not cause we guessed the word correctly within 30 seconds: Pronunciation. Luckily, Nikki was not sad about it and started to tell us something about carrying b'tell into a hottel.

Well, some of us really could not understand what on Earth she was talking about, could we, Jani :)?

 Soon enough, lucky us, we started to practise pronunciation, word stresses and sentence stresses...Well, if practising means shouting at Nikki, then yes, we were practising :)
After that, we revised the basic rules. It is always good to go through it again as we mainly can say where to put the stress but we do not know the exact rule...

 And at the end of the lesson, looking at our desks it seemed we had been working really, really hard :)

                                                                      
                                                                         THE END

Day Three, Session 2

Mr Hurst´s lecture called Cultural Content and FL Teaching was very engaging and funny. From now on I will always bear in mind the rule of triple “A”. A good coursebook should be

Authentic – teaching real language in real situations,

Appropriate to students´age and cultural background

and should contain Accurate facts and social references.

Even though I am usually leery of any political correctness stuff, I really enjoyed this lecture. Mainly because it was a real eye-opener for me.

When my school attendance started in the early nineties, it was shortly after The Velvet Revolution. I remember that my first textbooks were full of virtuous comrades and trips to prospering Soviet Union. I have never inclined to the political left despite all of that, therefore I was little bit sceptical about any crucial influence of textbooks on one´s life. Similarly my English coursebooks were stuffed with photos of successful men in suits, there were only policemen and firemen and women worked only as nurses or teachers. I thought I was immune against such nonsense. I always thought that I could become whoever I want to but after Mr Hurst´s lecture I realised … wait a minute … I am aspiring to become a teacher myself; I was probably subconsciously brainwashed. So thank you, authors of gender biased coursebooks, for ruining my life :-)

Day Three, Session 1

The first session of Day 3 didn’t start well because the room where we were supposed to be was occupied by nervous students preparing themselves for the state exam. So we were waiting and waiting until we got a key to “the most comfortable” classroom I’ve ever been to. The room was dark, without any windows and it looked like storage rather than a classroom – a perfect place for learning how to test! I took quite a comfortable chair and was looking forward to getting some information on designing and assessing tests because we, future teachers, will definitely need this skill but to my disappointment we got only unclear information about Thursday’s testing. On the one hand, I got to know a new method of assessing writing and speaking but on the other hand, was it necessary to spend the whole session on it? Did I really have to get up at 3.30 and travel 3 hours to get this information? The information that could have been easily sent by e-mail or discussed on the first day instead of teaching a non-linguistic skill, which nobody has given us any feedback on so far? Perhaps, I was expecting too much from the session and that was the problem…

Day Two: Multiple Intelligences (session 8)

As the last section of Tuesday´s afternoon we had another lecture by Nicolas Hurst, this time about Multiple Intelligences. We learned that each one of us (and of our future students) is a different type and has different attitudes and abilities to learning. Somebody needs to be helped by images to understand some concept, somebody needs to move to be able to learn or to understand.

 After that we were supposed to create activities that would do for different intelligence types to learn some specific fields of English (which led to some interesting ideas). No Roger disturbed the lecturer, nor has Jeff tried to steal Nikki from our classroom, so this time we finished quickly and we were free to start preparing for next, surely demanding, day.

Day Two: Grammar

Session 6: Grammar

An enormously exciting session on grammar was held on Tuesday by one of the best grammar experts Nicolas Hurst.

Nicolas came all the way from Portugal to teach us how to be good teachers and answer tricky questions like "What is grammar?"

I was trying hard to concentrate on what he was saying but was constantly interrupted by Nikki who was sitting in front of me. She was playing with her Ipad.

Finally I managed to write down some notes. Let me share some useful facts from his lesson with you:

• Nick has a cuddly friend named Roger (little with wings). Roger also comes from Portugal and I can tell he is NOT welcomed in the Czech republic at all.
• Most of the sources Nick shared with us were written 400 years ago by people slightly younger than queen Victoria.
• Nick´s wife is regularly hit, put in the cupboards and given special homework by Nick. Using these methods he forces her to get rid of using "Did he went?"
• Nick was wearing a tie with small creatures on it. I was trying to identify them throughout the lesson but was unsuccessfull.
  
  I hope you found my notes inspiring.

Day 2, Session 1

On Tuesday morning, we got down to serious work and started to deal with the topic “Teaching Vocabulary“. We learnt a short list of words to see how important context is in learning new vocabulary, then we had a discussion on what we remembered from the last semester and we even got to Nikki‘s favorite word again! (yes, the word is quagmire and we could still remember just one meaning – bažina)

After these exhausting activities we were asked to work even more. Nikki was standing in the front asking us to name different parts of her face. Interestingly, some of us thought that make-up was also part of it :) This session was really productive, because we finished it with another activity, which involved writing on the whiteboard. Some of us were so excited that they couldn’t hide it!

Moreover, we got many handouts so that we could study at home in our spare time! J 

Day One - Third section of the first day

After a delicious lunch - a bunch of questions to be answered by Nikki and James. The most important piece of information: we are getting CANDIES by the end of the week!
And beware of any suspicious stuff, we have been promised to get surprised... This course is getting dangerous (and that's but the beginning)!

Day 1, Session 2

And the time for homework is finally here. The last few seconds before were a bit hectic, since everyone was finalizing his or her non-linguistic skill. To enjoy our friends' performances as much as possible, we were placed  in a few groups. However, sharing one room with another group allowed us to enjoy even more shows. We learnt skills such as dancing (elementary, of course), magic tricks with napkins or finding the north using only your watch. It was a pleasure to see that each of us has a number of different nice skills which can make our future lessons more pleasant.

The Marshmallow Challenge

Hi guys, check out this Ted Talk video about the Mashmallow Challenge :)

Day One

Day one was lots of fun!

Just take a look at some of the photos from the day.......

Day 1, session 1

Scary stuff these ice-breakers :-) Every time I find myself takin part in one of them I always feel like I’m definitely gonna be the only one who doesn’t remember a single name or whatever the people said. Good to know we’re not getting grades for that :-) As a language student I liked building the spaghetti tower. It requires quite a bit of a language finesse to describe all the tiny operations that we were planning to carry out during the process. It is a shame though each group could not have their own native speaker who would help out every time we were short of vocab. Overall I view these activities as a lot of fun and a good way of learning for people who have the inner motivation to learn and who won’t be switching to Czech the second the teacher turns away.