Hi everyone and welcome to another entry馃榿
For this week's class we worked online on self-paced activities because in-site classes were suspended due to the university 42nd anniversary, it kind of felt like March 2020 all over again馃槄 I had to work on other assignments apart from this course and was really busy for the two days we didn't go to campus and it felt strange working from home again.
However, this week's topic was so interesting and there was a lot of material to go through but it was entertaining at the same time. Starting with lesson planning, I never would have imagines all of the things you need to take into account when planning what you will teach to your students, including their background, their level and what goals you want them to achieve at the end of the day.
Teachers are the first ones that need to understand the topic completely in order to make their lessons effective, they need to organize their ideas and have a clear objective, confidence plays a huge part as well, a teacher who is not confident in what they are teaching might not be so reliable, students might get distracted and there can be some behavior problems. And even though not every single move of the lesson needs to be planned, you do need to have the direction where you're going to, of course improvisation can be fun and if you deviate just for a moment from the lesson some interactions with the students can be more spontaneous and there can be magic moments that would not be possible if everything was controlled in an exaggerated way. Teachers need to find a balance and although spontaneous moments are good they also need to anticipate to problems and solutions, what are they going to do if something does not go as planned or students are not cooperating the way they expected them to? They won't just dismiss the class, they need to keep the lesson going and find solutions.
As I was mentioning about finding a balance, the same thing goes for when planning in real life, your budget, your trips, your future job, planning is actually so important, some people like to go with the flow and that is okay because sometimes you can plan a whole wedding for example and things might end up not going as planned but it is never wrong to have a plan b in all cases. It is so important to understand the importance of planning and being comfortable with last minute changes or improvising, this applies to all cases.
Moving on to the next topic of this week: CCQ (Concept Checking Questions) & ICQ (Instruction Checking Questions).
I actually had no idea that these questions had a name and an actual purpose, I thought that was just teachers doing their job and making sure we actually understood the assignment.
Basically, ICQs are to check if the students understand what they have to do when asked to work in pairs or groups or individually, instead of listing the instructions of the task and probably confusing them you can ask them after explaining "What are you going to do?" "Are you working in groups or pairs?" Make them engage and make sure they understand what they have to do.
CCQs are specific questions about a topic and you can use them to check if the students understand what they are being taught, with these questions you can check the meaning of a concept, a grammar structure or more vocabulary. You can have them participate in class and maybe even have them write on the board to check if they actually learned something from the lesson. When teaching the names of the colors you can show them different objects and have them answer that color it is or they can say their favorite color.
I think that is it for this week's entry, that was a lot of information to process but it was so fun and interesting, thank you so much for reading and stay tuned for my next entry, bye-bye!馃憢
P.S: I enjoyed the Bossa Nova playlist very much!馃拑
Thank you very much for keeping your blog updated. I'm glad to know that you enjoyed the Bossa Nova playlist :D
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