DOMAIN C: REFLECTION ON AND ASSESSMENT OF TEACHING 

 

C1. Teaching Assistants will monitor and adjust instructional strategies during teaching based on assessment evidence of student learning and development.

 

 

In my courses for the teaching certification, I had to do a pre and posttest unit, where I evaluated what students knew about the material and analyzed the results to plan according to the knowledge they did not posses. Once I taught the unit based on the results, I gave a posttest to verify if what I taught was effective or not. Finally, the last step for this unit was to evaluate those results and re-teach what students did not dominate after the unit. This revealed to me the importance of verifying students’ comprehension of the material and the necessity to re-teach if they did not fully comprehend what was instructed. In the case of the college level students of my Intermediate English I and II classes, who are assigned essays, not tests, I was constantly aware of the main goals of the course. The goals, which I stressed importance of in my class, were that students learn the steps of the writing process, the creation of adequate thesis statements, the structure of essays as well as the use of MLA, proper citation methods and evidence use. For each of the essays taught, when correcting, I would write down the most common errors presented by many of the students. Based upon this, I would take a day of class to discuss the errors and teach how to fix these errors in future papers. As the semester progressed, and I adjusted my calendar to include those error correction classes, the margin of student error in essays decreased significantly. It is very important to be aware of student errors and take time to correct them, not just on their essays, which they might never look at again, but in the classroom, where students are able to clarify doubts concerning to the reasons why the committed such errors. Repetition is a very important element as well because many students require the material to be taught in more than one class period to learn it properly, using exercises and practice to achieve this.

 

 

C2. Teaching Assistants will critically analyze own effectiveness in promoting learning and develop-ment.

 

 

It is important, not only to ask our students to reflect on how effective our teaching was to them but also how effective our planned courses seemed to us after they were given. On my first semester as a teaching assistant, I was given two sections of Intermediate English I. In these courses, which took place one after the other, I would plan the same activity, yet I would see different results many of the times. In my first section which was an earlier section students would come in tired, at times sleep deprived, and the activities, which I planned, had to focus on gaining their attention and maintaining it throughout the class time, to wake students up to learning. In my second course, which was during lunch hour, students had high levels of energy, they were awake and at times anxious to leave for lunch break. In this case, I had to plan accordingly and maintain student attention from drifting away into thoughts of their hunger and desire to leave because of this. Every activity, although in content and goal of learning were the same, in approach and method varied greatly, as I managed to keep students on track to complete each assignment. As I reflected during that semester upon my teaching experience, I was able to observe that my attitude affected students as well, if I seemed tired, students would perceive this, and attempt to take advantage of this by asking to be let early out of class, etc. In my second section, I was more alert and because I had previously given the same class an hour before and learned what worked and would not, I was able to improve my teaching techniques. Students’ attitude would reveal this as well, bringing forth a motivated approach to the classroom. By the end of the semester, I managed to reflect and maintain both groups with similarly motivated attitudes, as I gained experience with each class taught. Another opportunity to reflect upon my teaching was the comparison between my first time teaching Intermediate English I on 2014 and on 2015. The courses had similar goals, teaching informative, argumentative and rhetorical analysis essays, yet the method of teaching each course were completely different. I was able to improve my teaching by maintaining those activities, which worked, and removing those activities, which I noticed were less effective in helping achieve the class goals. During the first semester teaching the course, I was told to teach argument first, and then go on to rhetorical and causal analysis. On the class given on my second time, I was given a book, which guided me in my teaching and helped greatly in achieving the goal of having students express their own opinion and find their voice as writers. In this book the first essay to teach was reflective, which opened them up to the world of writing, then informative essays, where they reported what they learned from the research they conducted. These essays were followed by argumentative, where they finally had an opportunity to express their opinion on different topics, using research, which they learned to conduct during their informative essays and finally rhetorical analysis, where they learned to decompose discourses and analyze their persuasive appeals. I am immensely happy with the results of my second time teaching the course and how effective it was thanks to my reflection of what was effective and ineffective in the courses I taught.

 

 

 

C3. Teaching Assistants will inquire systematically into their practice in order to improve curriculum and instruction for all learners.

 

 

In the courses required for the teaching certification, which are Ingl 5010 (Perspectives of Teaching English as a Second Language), Edpe 4245 (Theory and Methodology in the Teaching of English in Secondary School) and Edpe 4246 (Student Teaching of English in Secondary Schools), the professor for these courses taught us future teachers the importance of self-reflection and feedback. For each of the essays given during both Intermediate English I and II, I would often inquire of students the level of understanding and difficulty of these tasks. In some cases they were assigned to do so on paper, evidence of these will be provided below, and at other times, this was part of the activities given after the due dates of the essays. It is important to be open to receive feedback from our students, as they are the ones who will signal to us how effective our teaching is and if there needs to be time for re-teaching sections of the material. This is a factor which our professor Rosa Roman, from the above mentioned courses, taught us. We are only as effective as the students who learned from us demonstrate. Our classes can be planned perfectly, yet if we are not able to reach and communicate with our students our teaching will float by them, without gaining the proper knowledge required for their successful development as writer.