Practicum II Experience

My name is Tomas Antonio Lievano Lazo, I am 22 years old, this is my fourth year at the University and I am studying a major in teaching; furthermore, I would like to mention that I have been exposed to the teaching field since the very beginning of my career since I have taken subjects such as didactics, psych pedagogy, Practicum I and now I am about to finish Practicum II. In this Practicum II course, I expected to get to know teenagers better and in fact I did; also, I started using ECRIF as the main tool to plan classes and I was expecting it to be challenging since I was used to plan with the PPP and the PDP frameworks; anyways, ECRIF was a new opportunity to plan classes in a more specific way and I think that with ECRIF lesson plan’s goals and objectives are easily reachable.

                ECRIF was ready for me but I did not feel ready for ECRIF because the very first time I saw this “new” lesson plan I realized that there were a lot of new things that I did not have idea about what they were for. Thus, according to my experience, I could say that the most challenging part of ECRIF is to think in a lot activities that you will need to perform in order to teach your lesson, and, I am saying this because we were required to include the following parts on our lessons: community builder, encounter, clarify, remember, internalize, fluently use and wrap up; Furthermore, there were a lot of activities to think about at the time of planning and we only had 45 minutes to develop the class so time and ideas were my enemies throughout all the semester. However, after planning some lessons I overcame these problems by looking for activities that were easy to perform, and students were going to love, and, at the same time they match the class’ objective accordingly.

                Teaching was not something new for all the students in this Practicum II class since we were together on Practicum I and most of us had shown a great improvement from the very first time they taught a lesson in front of us. I would like tome mention some of them and I would start with my classmate Deyanira because she had improved a lot. First, Her materials were great since they were big enough, catchy for teenagers’ eyes and colorful. Second and the most important, her voice projection was perfect since I was able to listen to her easily and students did as well. Third, she used the class’ space perfectly since I nonticed that she was moving around on her lessons and I did not see her nervous. Another classmate that had shown a great improvement is Yennifer because when she started teaching I noticed that her mood was not at the same level of the students; however when she taught her final lesson, she looked different and she was able to maintain the level in which she started throughout the whole lesson that made students felt comfortable. Also, I would like to mention that she is very dynamic at the time of teaching and teenagers enjoy having a teacher with such quality.

                To conclude I would like to mention that this class had been extremely helpful since now I know how to teach teenagers and how to plan an effective lesson that will match my goals and objectives accordingly by using ECRIF. Even though I know how to plan and how to assess my students, I think that I still need to get more experience on the teaching field since somehow I felt that my classes were not at the level that I wanted them to be. Anyways, this Practicum II course had been fully rewarding since I have learned new things that get me closer to become a teacher.