Figen, the teacher trainer :)

Last week, I had my first experience as a teacher trainer which I found really very hard. I wore the hat of the teacher trainer, Dilek's was the trainee's and Tony was observing us in this practice.

I was well prepared and ready for the practice. Everything went well according to my plan at first, or I thought so. After 15 minutes, I found myself trying to relax Dilek and make her reflect on her teaching practice, but I knew that I couldn't do that. I realized what the problem was when Tony told us to take a deep breath and start to talk about how we both felt. As my questions "how" questions had turned into "why questions, Dilek started to defend herself and I started to ask more and more and didn't let her reflect. Now, I'm trying to "reflect" on my practice as a teacher trainer. There may be two reasons of this problem. As I saw that I couldn't achieve my aims that I had in this practice, I changed the type of questions I had in my mind. I wanted Dilek to talk about the areas I had in my plan. She started to talk about them, but to me I couldn't make her realize that these areas were the ones to talk about in detail. The second one is I felt that I couldn't make her feel comfortable in this practice. If she had felt more comfortable, she would have reflected the parts that went well in the class more.

I guess I have a looong way to go to become a teacher trainer. I know it is very normal to experience that kind of a problem in the first try. I can't become a teacher trainer overnight and I know practice will make it perfect :)

Togetherness

Reflection 7 Mayıs By Dilek Turan eroğlu

Today, my coworker, Figen, observed my classroom. I was teaching "narration" revising all past tenses and some useful expressions. In the first hour I focused on the structure and had my students do some structured "fill in the blanks" activities. Giving the answers and talking about the reasons and the clues I guess the students were  ready to produce some language using the target points.

First, I read them a story written by me telling about an event happened in the classroom. The story I read was from the student's point of view and I asked them to retell the other side of the story from the teacher's point of view. They acted like two teachers in the teachers room and one of them told what happened in the classroom and the other one was responding asking questions or commenting.

Secondly, I put the students in groups of 4 and gave one piece of sheet to each group. I wrote the first three lines of a story on the board and the students were supposed to complete it. Here, the key point was in each group every student had to wait his turn to add one sentence to their story. In other words, reading the previously written sentences by their group members they wrote their sentences. They had 5 or 6 turns and in the end they would write the whole story.

It was an enjoyable lesson for me and for my students and the learning outcomes have been achieved.Seeing that the students could use past forms including "would" and "saw/heard doing...", I was relieved.

Reflection Week 1- Figen

I have been teaching for ten years now, and I haven't had that kind of a class with this small number of students. Two is better than one or none :), but I felt very strange while teaching only two students in the class. I was very effective in giving feedback to their written works as we had enough time, or I was able to focus on their weaknesses that occured in the class, but the missing thing was interaction. I tried hard to make them interact with each other in all the activities but they got bored with speaking to the same person for six hours. I do not know how to cope with this problem for 6 weeks..