Samantha Wojcik

EDUC 359
Prof. Reilly
8/31/15
Mini Lesson Reflection
There are many challenges that teachers face in their classrooms, especially when
it comes to students with special needs or students who are English Language Learners.
When preparing for our mini-lesson, my group faced the challenge of making our lesson
easy to understand especially for the students who may not have known Spanish. This
was difficult for us, especially since we are not fluent in Spanish ourselves. In order to
overcome this challenge, we decided to use short phrases, pictures, background
information, and body language to give our lesson. Using this type of language helped us
to teach our content to students who did not fully understand the language we were
speaking in class.
As a future teacher, this activity simulated trying to instruct English Language
Learners in my classroom by showing me the difficulties that I may have trying to teach
content that these students may not understand. Having a class full of students who were
not fluent in the language we were teaching in was a challenge for us. It showed us that
we would have to use different types of language such as auditory, visual, and tactile to
teach my students, especially those who are English Language Learners. In my lesson,
my group used many visuals to convey our material. We used pictures, written words, and
body language to try to help the students understand what we were saying, even if they
could not understand our actual spoken words.

Being a student during this activity showed me how difficult it must be for
English Language Learners to fully understand the content of a lesson, especially if you
do not know a lot of what is being said by the teacher due to the spoken language barrier.
I saw what a challenge it can be to understand what the teacher wants, especially because
visuals can be misinterpreted. It showed me that it is very helpful to have teachers use
visuals and body language to help students understand what is being taught.
I think the main purpose of this activity was to put ourselves in the shoes of the
English Language Learner students that will be in our future classrooms. We were able to
better understand how difficult it can be for our ELL students to learn content in our
classroom. We also learned better techniques to teach these students using body language,
pictures, and background information.