On 3rd March, 2021, Wednesday evening, I joined the LLC Conversation Club’s Social Room for delivering my 6th practica. The topic covered was ‘What you want to be in life/Jobs’. I selected this topic believing that everyone could relate to it. 2 ISLA theories were used to design the task namely, Task based Language Teaching and Interactionist Approach.

Reflections

As I reflect upon my teaching session, there are a few things that appealed me. Firstly, two-color-codes (red& blue) were used to make teams and name tags. Furthermore because this was a time bound task (30 seconds for each ans), it created a sense of challenge and put competitive pressure on individual students to perform. As a result, gaming theory was introduced in the design of the activities, engaging students with a  sense of healthy competition. This made them stay alert at all times and perform cognitively. As always various Moddle tools were used like the breakout rooms, shared notes, public chat, polling and the interactive whiteboard. This added variation element and kept the students entertained throughout the class. Interestingly, 100% interaction was accomplished from all the students in the class. I worked towards it in this session as well, not only did I prepared lists and 2 colored name tags, but I also ticked the students names as they spoke to keep a double check and call on the students who had not spoken. Today, this proved very useful as it helped me identify 1 student (Elizabeth) out of 13 students, who did not participate in the interactive job circle. Because I was ticking on my student list, the names of students who had spoken, towards the end of this activity, I was quickly able to find out that Elizabeth had not placed herself in the job circle and not spoken. This helped me call out to her and seek the answer, hence achieving 100% student participation in this activity. I see great value in using it in the future.

Furthermore, there are a few things that I have to work on. I exceeded the time again by 3-4 minutes. I realize that at some places I increased my speed but controlled it later. I still have to work on maintaining a normal speed of speaking throughout the session.

My key take-aways are as follows. Based to today’s experience, I now have a firm belief in using my self-devised strategy of maintain and checking lists & name tags to ensure that all students participate uniformly. This certainly helps in ensuring full involvement of the classroom. Also, in my opinion, ensuring student engagement from the very 1st slide is imperative. Lastly, as students love variety, I hope to continue giving them that using all the tools of Moodle, colorful slides, activities, name tags etc.

As per the instructions of our Tesl-3050 teacher, I collected student feedback. Students were asked 3 questions. Feedback received is mentioned below as answers to the questions:-

Q.1 Something you want me to do differently?

Ans. “you are awesome”

Q.2 Anything you want me to change?

Ans. “more games!!”

         “maybe the class time” (could be because its late evening and early morning for some)

Q.3 Anything you don’t want me to change?

 Ans. “keep going with playing game in the class.”

          “Funny games”