As I begin my reflective teaching blog, I do so with trepidation. Microteaching! Seeing myself on video! Hearing my voice, which somehow transforms into what I later hear as strident and pendantic, conveying messages that assume I have something to say which might possibly be useful for a room full of intellectual beings. Facing my own errors. And yet, in the last week I've already learned more about what I WANT to be as a teacher than in many months before, combined. 

On to face the terror. 

This week, after several mishaps and a schedule upset by standardized testing and the resulting numerous lesson changes, I managed to video a practice exercise for PN Class, a mid-beginners-level hagwon class of students Korean- aged 9-11. In this exercise, we reviewed descriptions of appearances, using the target question/answer "What does___________ look like?" "He/she has___________ hair and ___________ [eyes, clothing, etc.]" My students learned this material one week ago and have been reviewing a bit each day until standardized testing interrupted them. Their eagerness to converse and lively personalities often get in the way of careful speech and recalling grammar patterns previously learned. 

We accomplished the goal of practicing the sentences, but we found ourselves limited by the fact that students' hair and eye color were so similar and their additional vocabulary for physical description is still limited. 

As I reviewed the video, I noticed a number of things that bothered me in my own teaching style (besides my "teacher voice" which is hopefully less annoying to everyone else than to myself):

*Although I tried to encourage an environment of relaxed fun for the game, we were pressed for time and I found myself rushing the students' responses as we discussed the instructions. 

* While I did comprehension checks for CONTENT, I noticed that comprehension checks for DIRECTIONS were not there. This was evidenced later, as I realized that students didn't know TO WHOM they were supposed to be asking questions - the person beside them, or across from them!!
I should have allowed students to paraphrase instructions - as well as target grammar - in their own words. 

*Although allowing students to ASK QUESTIONS is a big personal push for me right now ( as it's been pointed out that English as a foreign language speakers are not encouraged to formulate questions until far after beginner stages) the question being asked in this exercise had little variation. The answer, however, had too few guidelines for beginner students. I noticed many of them creeping into error. 

* I noticed that cueing students' correct answers is sometimes less effective, even at that age, than chunking. I'm usually concerned about demeaning older students by breaking things down in a way that may seem juvenile, but I noticed in the video that the student James, for example, needed mechanisms for practicing grammar structure. 

**This video called to my attention again the need for variation in error correction. I'm beginning to learn more toward encouraging self-correction as I think it re-enforces learning patterns...but how to do this with limited time? Time management is never my strong suit...