Assignment 4

Lessons from the Classroom

Assessment Criteria

Your written assignments need to be legible and reasonably presented. As a

teacher of English, you need to be accurate in your spelling and punctuation so
please take care with these areas. If you fail an assignment, you may be asked to
resubmit it.
You need to demonstrate your learning by:
a) Noting your own teaching strengths and weaknesses in different situations in
light of feedback from learners, teachers and teacher educators
b) Identifying which areas of ELT knowledge and skills you need further
development in
c) Describing in a specific way how you might develop your ELT knowledge and
skills beyond the course
d) Using written language that is clear accurate and appropriate to the task
Adapted from CELTA Syllabus and Assessment Guidelines
PART A
In the first week of the course you are exposed to adults learning and teaching
languages in three situations: your students learning from you, students learning
from experienced teachers in demonstration lessons and when you were taught a
foreign language.
Consider above situations and:
identify successful aspects of your teaching and discuss why these were
successful
identify aspects of your teaching that you would like to improve and suggest
improvements. Provide practical suggestions, drawing on classroom teaching
you have observed
Your answer does not need to be written in a formal style, first person is fine. Use
the above points as sub-headings to organise your answer. Support your
observations with practical examples wherever possible.

PART B

(to be completed after your penultimate TP in week 4)

Now that you have almost finished your assessed teaching practice, consider your
further development needs by outlining how you plan to develop your ELT
knowledge and skills after the course. Provide three or four specific ideas (e.g.
arrange to watch experienced colleagues, read published matter on developing
listening skills).

Weakness
Doing my self-evaluation, I recognize several weaknesses and I have to work on. My
What I have learnt from the observation of my peers and the experienced teachers
about effective teaching.
From observing my peers and experienced teachers, I have seen that effective teaching
can be delivered in different ways yet still has certain key aspects. Perhaps the most
important aspect of effective teaching is good planning. If it is well planned, the aims
of the lesson will be clear to both the teacher and the students. A good example of this
was a lesson by DL, which I observed on the twelfth of September 2013. To have a
successful lesson plan, it is important to know the stages of the lesson that are
relevant to the subject matter being taught. Having the correctly planned stages will
help a lesson to flow and will be more effective. This also works in reverse, if the stages
are not clear, they can become confused during a lesson. This makes things more
difficult for the teacher as well as the students as it can then be difficult to understand
what the aim for each task is. This was shown in Ms second teaching practise where
he was confused about two of the stages of the lesson. Consequently, some of his
instructions were confusing and it affected his confidence and the rest of the lesson
Another aspect of effective teaching is ensuring that tasks are set in a relevant
context, are varied and give a sense of achievement to the students after completion.
Having a relevant context and varied tasks will keep the students interested and
therefore will be better at absorbing new information. Also, if the tasks are the right
level of difficulty the students will get a sense of achievement from completing them,
which will help to keep them motivated, and they know that they are making progress.
Scrivener (2011/pg256) agrees. This was shown in the second lesson I observed with
DL. The students found the tasks quite difficult but looked happy when they had
successfully completed them