My Practicum is almost over…

Today I have finished my teaching unit. I’ve done my sixth hour of class with the 4ESO students and, to tell the truth, I feel happy and sad at the same time, because I’ve enjoyed working with these children very much, and I’ve lived a really nice experience while observing, learning, teaching and getting to know how a school works.



I’ve developed my unit plan in six hours. As I said the previous day, I introduced the topic by showing them a PowerPoint presentation and talking about music preferences. I’ve tried to work particularly the communicative competence by writing and expressing their personal likes, dislikes and opinions using activities with different kinds of approaches and resources.

Some of the activities worked out really well, others didn’t, but at least I think they’ve practiced a lot and they’ve talked very much in class. That’s what I wanted from them, because it seems to be a class where they do grammar and other exercises from their course book and not many tasks where they can interact and speak.



I’ve also tried to use different methods and resourced, such as ICT activities (although resources are very limited here), exercises in which they have to work in pairs or groups, activities where they could go moving around the class asking their classmates, interviews, songs, etc… I’ve been assessing all the activities they’ve done (in the way that I know who has participated more, who has tried their best and who hasn’t done the tasks) and I gave them a final project which would be an important mark; they had to write a poster with biography of their favourite music group or singer. We played the “who is who” game with that too, and I’ll be marking their works this week.



So, my experience as a trainee teacher at IES Joan d’Àustria is almost finished. Now, we still have two more “out of class” hours; that would be a meeting with my tutor in order to consider how my Practicum has gone and the “avaluació final”, where the teachers will talk abut each student and group and we’ll be able to see how this kind of meeting works. After that, I guess I’d still keep in touch with my tutor, but we won’t go to the high school anymore… well, I might set foot in this school some day as a teacher, but not as a teacher-to-be anymore (hopefully!).




I just want to finish by thanking my tutor, Mercè, who has been very nice to both me and my colleague; to Marta, from whom I've also learnt a lot and with whom it's been a pleasure to work with; and to all the students, to whom I've gotten very attached to. It's been a nice and enriching experience and I'm sure I've taken a lot of advantage of it!