Name of School: Colegio Carlos Cousiño
Date: September 14 and 16
For the following questions describe as accurately as you can how you have collaborated in school assigned:
1. What kind of activity did you perform the first time you were asked for help? How long did it take?
I just had one week of assistantship (Monday and Wednesday). The activities I performed during this week were the following: to help students with the exercises they were doing and to clarify their doubts; I also helped the teacher to check the “summative” exercises.
On Wednesday the teacher had to leave 20 minutes earlier because she was feeling bad so she asked me if I could take care of the class; she gave a guide with exercises to the students and I was in charge of the activity until the class ended.
2. What were the students doing before you started helping out?
When I first arrived the class, students were doing exercises about the differences between simple past and present perfect.
3. How did the students react? Describe the atmosphere of the room and the levels of engagement in the room.
The first time I arrived the classroom the teacher introduced me to the students and suggested me to sit at the end of the classroom. The girls were very talkative, and just some of them were doing the activity of the class, I felt I was invisible to the students the first week, but as the classes were passing by, students started to ask me some vocabulary words so that for the assistantship week they were more familiarized and comfortable with my presence in the classroom.
4. What other assignments were asked you to do? How often?
The truth is that, as it was just one week of assistantship (two days) I did not have much time to do things. I have already mentioned the things I did: I helped the teacher to check the “summative” activities and I helped the students with their doubts about the subject.
5. Were you asked to prepare any kind of special audio visual material learning material for the students? Were they used? How effective were they?
Among other things I did, the teacher asked me if I had any reading about “great woman”. I looked for the text, I found it in a book and I gave it to her but it was not what she was looking for, because she wanted a text that combined simple past and present perfect and the text I found just had simple past, she thanked me anyway and told me not to worry because she was going to get the text from another colleague.
1. How did you get the information for planning the lessons for your students?
During the observation stage I got information from the class book about the students’ background and I also carried out an interest-survey in order to know a little bit more about the students’ interests and their opinions about the English class.
This, in addition to the guide-teacher’s suggestions helped me to get information for planning the unit and lessons. The teacher gave me the topic and the contents for the unit, but she gave me freedom to create the activities. Every lesson plan was consulted with the guide-teacher in order to get her feedback and suggestions.
2. Did your guide teacher give you any suggestions for planning?
Yes she did, although she gave me freedom to plan my lessons and activities as I wanted, she gave me the topic and contents of the unit and asked me to keep her “summative” marks for class activities. Every class the teacher gives homework, tasks or activities for the students to work in class and then she calls some of the students to check the activities in order to put a mark; at the end of the semester she adds up all the marks and gets a final one.
3. How long did it take to you to prepare learning material for your first lesson?
It took me 2 days to prepare the unit plan content, objectives and generic activities and it took me a whole day to get and prepare all the learning material for the first lesson and plan the methodology.
