Beginning semester 2 of Formación, I had five trainees: M, C, E, V and now A, who had come from the "split up" of a previous OPP group. I wasn't too concerned as, although he was a little "problematic", his personality was more dynamic and I thought it would make a good mix for the rest of the group, which was, in general, pretty sort of quiet and laidback. As far as this goes, I think it worked to have someone with totally new ideas and methods for the class. However, C dropped out of Formación after just the first week or so, and E was dropped from the course due to attendance and punctuality problems. This left just three trainees: 2 from last semester, and the "new guy". Having chosen and agreed to give an advanced Writing course with my trainees because I was sure they would be up to it, suddenly having this unbalanced smaller group changed things considerably. Still, for the most part, they were able to give the writing classes necessary and actually do it well ... I say for the most part and am sticking to it, without going into more details. At the end of the course I decided to give them all a 10 for OPP. This seems a bit strange, seeing how I was so strict on my former trainees of 2008 (one 10, four 9s and a 7); but every time I think of it, I remember how much of a struggle it was for all three in this course. One had a full-time job and still had to cancel a private class in order to attend; another had a full-time job as well as a new baby who was having health issues; and one had bitten off more than he could chew with his classes at FFyL, the CELE and his work. The classes went from 5-9pm, which wasn't easy for anybody; yet their attendance and participation was adequate throughout. Not all the classes were the best, but they were good enough to keep the students happy, and a number made positive comments at the end of the course, particularly about M and A. And it was Advanced Writing, which was a big enough challenge in itself, let alone having all the other pressures on top of that. For these reasons I think the three did an admirable job and deserved a good grade.
I think I learned three important things this semester from my trainees.
1. How to give feedback. I always try to give both positive and (if necessary) negative feedback, after first hearing what the trainee observed, felt and thought about the class he gave, and when possible getting other feedback from the other trainees as well before launching into my own. Still, it seemed to A that the feedback I gave in his initial classes was overly unbalanced towards the negative side. In fact he considered I hadn't given any positive feedback at all, which wasn't true, as I can vouch for in my notes. But to him it seemed that way. Was he just a particularly sensitive soul? Or did he only hear selectively (which did happen on other occasions)? Either way, it helped me realize that I need to be more careful in the way I give my feedback. In this I learned something from M, who on the Google Group page we'd opened was able to give feedback which, while being inherently negative, sounded positive just from the way he wrote it.
2. When in situations of receiving lesson plans for reviewing (particularly for final observation, but not exclusively for this) I need to be more organized in order to spend time, when necessary, on weekends. Cos Monday night is too late to give feedback for a Tuesday class. And it wasn't the trainee's fault - he'd sent it on Saturday morning. This happened on more than one occasion. Don't assume the lesson plan will all be OK. Organization is a bigger key to helping trainees than what perhaps I might think.
3. M's work on helping students work on language transfer errors is something I definitely want to work on more this semester with my "new" writing class. I'm interested in the variation on Vigil and Oller's model that M made, whereby we give positive cognitive feedback ("I understand") and negative affective feedback ("but I don't like it") - not because I don't like you, but because what you said was not said correctly. At the level of the so-called Advanced students, who continue to manifest simple errors in their written work such as "He say" and "Is very difficult", it may well make a difference to the students to receive some more pointed comments to help break them out of this, without going too far and causing them to cease trying; on the contrary, the objective is to help them continue trying, and improve in accuracy, while giving them opportunity to provide feedback themselves on what I'm doing. We'll see. After helping M give a presentation on his Action-Research project on fossilization and syntactic language transfer errors, I'd like to make a conscious effort from the beginning of term to work with my students on this and see if there might be a difference at the end of term. I'll need to work on how to evaluate this at the end of term as well.
One last comment about the teacher trainees, I guess, is that I think I became too emotionally involved with the three: one (in the end) negatively, two positively. Perhaps it was also the fact that the advanced class was a greater challenge for them, I felt I needed to give them more help than I otherwise would have done with a lower-level class; but by the end of the year I was a helpless wreck of constantly flowing tears while writing their final evaluations and comments. I'm sure most teachers don't go through this to quite the same extent. I don't want to get that emotionally involved again. I think in the future when I teach OPP, apart from having a thicker skin, I will need to ask for a couple of things:
a. That I don't have my own class to teach during that time (if possible). It takes a lot of time away from teaching OPP and then gives the trainees less time to practice themselves. It also allows me not to have such an emotional attachment to the class they practice with, as it's not "my" class, which allows me to sit back a bit more and allow the trainees to learn from their own mistakes, rather than trying desperately to prevent accidents before they happen in the class.
b. That the practice classes always be lower-level classes.
And for myself I'm kinda happy I have become friends with two of the three remaining trainees, but I do need to be careful not to allow the prospect of future friendship to cloud any judgements on their performance. Not that I think it did this last year, but I want to make sure it doesn't in the future either, as I suspect it is something that may well lurk in the background of many teachers. For this I need God's help to keep me wise and discerning with regard to timing.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario