It's now the beginning of our last week of break before the new school year begins. Beginning today the teachers are returning to school to make preparations for the new school year. We have begun making our "teaching schemes" for each of our classes. This is basically an outline of the material that we must cover for the year and the order in which we are going to teach it. I'm not sure how useful it will be for me since I know that we're going to get off schedule no matter what I write down now. At least I've taught the material once before, so I know what subjects the students are bound to struggle with and which ones we will probably fly through. Overall, I anticipate a successful year (or, well, half year since I will leave in June so I can begin my graduate studies).
As I am making this teaching schemes, I'm trying to think over what I did last year and how I can improve my quality of teaching for this year. Last year, I stuck very close to the book, mostly because I had almost NO idea what I was doing. By that, I mean that I have no formal training in teaching English (my undergraduate is in music education), much less how to teach English as a second language. But, never fear, last year was quite successful, and as I posted before, all of our class VII students were placed into public secondary schools. By the end of the year, I had branched out a bit and had added words of the day, journal activities, and reading activities. But, I want to be able to make those more effective for this year.
Soooo, I've decided that I'm going to re-vamp my ideas. Here are some teacher's resolutions that I've made to based on my experiences this past year so that I can be a more effective teacher!
My first resolution is to change my approach to vocabulary. Last year, I really enjoyed starting with the word of the day because it got the class quieted down. But, then I started adding in journals and reading out-loud to the students. Altogether, those activities can take up a significant amount of time. So, instead of doing a word each day, we're going to do a short list of words each week. The students already know what I expect from their sentences for their words of the day, so I'll have them write those for homework instead of in-class. I think this will save class time for other activities. Also, if I give out the word list on Mondays, that will give the students multiple days to study and prepare for a short vocabulary quiz each week. Previously, I always felt bad giving the kids a quiz on the words of the day because I felt like they didn't have enough time to study some of the words and too much time to study others.
Another thing I want to change about this year: I want to incorporate more outside materials. I did get better at this as the past year went on, but I didn't wander too far away from the book. We've now got quite a few new resources that Kjirstin brought with all kinds of activities for English class. Also, I have some stuff that people donated to me to use in the classroom (though, not as much since I asked more for chapter books). I'm really excited about being able to incorporate these resources and activities so that I can "energize" my teaching!
My final resolution is to incorporate homework into my teaching. I tried to assign English homework last year, but not very successfully. I would frequently forget to give the students the homework assignment. And, because the homework assignments were so sporadic and randomly given, I had trouble getting the students to actually do it. But, this year, I've decided that I'm going to give homework Mon-Thus. (I decided that it would be nice to give them a break over the weekend). Although I may choose to give homework specific to the material we are covering in class, I mostly want the homework to be about tenses. This is something that the students really struggle with and I want them to have as much practice with it as possible. I think that a having daily tense assignments will help them overcome problems that they face with this specific part of English.
Well, there you have it! Like all people who make new year's resolutions, we shall see if these resolutions will actually carry through throughout the year. I hope that they will since I think they're rather reasonable and easy to incorporate into my classes!
Well, that's about all I've got for now. I'm coming up to the anniversary for my first year in Tanzania, so stay tuned for a blog about that later this week.
I hope you are having a great week!
May the Lord Bless You and Keep You,
~Christine
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