Practicum Reflection Paper

Every fourth-year teacher trainees will have to conduct practicum and will work under the guideline of their associate teachers and supervisors. The purpose of doing the practicum are to put training into practice, to become accustomed to teaching in the tertiary school settings, and to develop and expand each trainee’s teaching expertise and confidence. In the following paragraph, I will express what I have learnt from doing practicum to reflect on my past teaching strengths and weaknesses from the teaching practicum.

Firstly, I would like to talk about the lesson planning and delivering. As we have already learnt from Teaching Methodology 402, lesson plan works as guideline and help us a lot as teacher trainees. It reminds us what to do, which data and techniques to use to facilitate both teaching and learning. As for the process of planning and delivering the lesson plan, I would dear to say that it is not an easy thing to do. For my case, the first time I planned my lesson plan I spent about ten hours to complete it.

I had to think of the objectives of the lesson I would teach, collect materials to use, and select techniques which is suitable with the materials I chose and would help students to have reason to study. It is not enough yet; I had also discussed with both my associate and supervisor lecturers and my peers for ideas and advice. Next, it is about the classroom management. Monitoring students and the class is needed during our teaching. We have to make sure that students are listening to our instruction, when we are giving it to them. We can ask one or two students to repeat or tell other students what they are supposed to do.

It is recommended that we have to frequently spend our time walking around the class. In doing so, we can monitor the students effectively. Also, it is easy for students to ask question if there are any. Voice projection also plays very important in language teaching. It is fact that louder speech can make our teaching more interesting. But if we speak too soft, the students will get bored because sometimes they cannot hear us properly. One of teacher trainees I have observed got only mark just around the border line score. The reason is that her voice is too soft.

Last but not least, pronunciation, it is very important for us as the language teacher especially when teaching vocabulary and we have to pronounce words correctly. I could see that almost all associate teachers and supervisors always focus on and tell every teacher trainee before and after he or she teaches. I myself have been given comments related to this problem from both my associate teacher and supervisor during my teaching. Actually, I am also aware of this issue and it is clear I could not get full mark for this from my lectures. However, I will to improve my pronunciation so I will be better my teaching in the future.

In conclusion, I have gained more knowledge and experiences from doing practicum not just from associate and supervisor lecturers and my peers, but also from the students I have taught. Most people think that teaching the language is not very difficult. They just come to class and explain the students based on the course book. However, it is not the right thought to my understanding and observation so far. To achieve good result of teaching, we have to consider number of thing carefully such as lesson planning and delivering, classroom management, methodology, and other important aspects in teaching.