Teaching Practice
Preparation
In both of my classes, I made sure that I am able to create a routine so that every time I go to class, the students have a sense of familiarity with me. This video shows the morning greetings that I taught both the regular and the bilingual class, inspired by a popular greeting video in the Philippines. After I do this, I help them review our classroom rules to ensure that the class will be organized and the students know what they should do. These are:
Motivations and Engaging Activities
To set my students' mood and energy for the class, I always include an energizer activity, motivations, and engaging activities that can be connected to the topic/lesson. These videos show some of the activities that my students and I did in class.
Problem Solving
When it comes to problems, I usually just encounter a/some student/s who are not participating in class. Whenever this happens, I go straight to the student and communicate with him/her directly. I usually do not ask why they are not participating. Instead, I ask if there is anything that they need, is there any distractor that he/she wants removed, or if there is anything hurting. This way, I can elicit communication with whatever their answers are. In addition, I directly involve them in the discussion by continuously asking them questions or their opinion/idea so that they know that I can see them and I notice that they cannot focus.
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Also, I encounter some problems with time, because sometimes, there are school events that coincide with the time of my class. What I do is I adjust what is written in the lesson plan. As my cooperating teacher would say, "things happen." That is why I learned to be flexible and become alert about what to do whenever "things happen.". We can't rigidly and strictly ALWAYS follow what is written on our lesson plan. Lesson plans are there to serve as our guide in teaching, not to be an unbendable manual.