Pedagogy Final Assignment

This year was quite different than the other years. We, the second-year students, were quite shocked and stressed. This year was supposed to be the first time we get to teach elementary and enter the school.  The first semester Jennifer had taught us how to plan our lessons, write our own reflections, and using L1 in the classroom. Pedagogy was a  very important course filled with different kinds of effective tools we needed for our teaching practice. Jennifer had made us discuss the differences between teaching frontally vs online lessons. In the second semester, Jennifer had taught us skills of language learning, listening strategies, and a lot of speaking in the classroom.  Jennifer showed us different sites and videos with how to use speaking in the classroom, how to correct students while they are reading and many more excellent strategies for teaching. Jennifer had taught us how to use reading in the classroom in a fun and exciting way, like to use it as acting and give each pupil a role. In my opinion, the most useful thing that Jennifer had taught us during both semesters is lesson planning.

Lesson Planning is a teacher’s guide paper, this guide helps us accomplish the material we needed to teach. Lesson planning is the most important tool for a teacher, it helps you get organized for your lesson. Being far from the lecturer, the students, and the pupils was very hard and intense, sometimes we get stressed and forget what we need or want to teach. Lesson planning is the solution to every problem, it helps you out and saves you. Once I entered the practical training at school, I realized how effective was the lesson planning lessons Jennifer had been teaching us throughout the first and second semesters. On the other hand, Lesson planning is not that easy as we think, especially when teaching was on Zoom. Sometimes you forget to go over things you had written on your lesson plan, and sometimes you make up activities during the lesson. Furthermore, one day the pupils might not enter the lessons and the other day you can have the whole classroom with no cameras on. I remember my first lesson was devastating, I felt like I didn’t have any classroom management or any continuity to my lessons in front of the students on camera. I always had to mute the classroom for me to say something or explain a different topic. Jennifer, my lecturer had told me that it is completely fine what matters is the quality and not the quantity. Jennifer had guided me and gave me one wonderful tip that helped me throughout the whole teaching practice; to print out the lesson plan and put it in front of me while I teach, highlight what I finish doing and in that way, I can keep track of my teaching and never forget anything. I slowly understood that all the lessons on lesson planning we did during the whole semester had helped me be the teacher I am today.

This year, we learned many interesting things about teaching. We got all the advice needed from our lecturers in the college and went off to teach for our first time in elementary school. Suddenly, once I got to school frontally I felt like we didn’t discuss some important things that all teachers must go over before going into school. For example: How to handle a classroom with students being bullied. Bullying nowadays has been a big issue in school, kids commit suicide because they end up all alone with no one to talk to. The teachers spend more time with the students than their parents, and I think that one of the responsibilities is the teachers. But the teachers don’t know how to approach and deal with the situation, so they accuse the parents of not being aware and this is extremely wrong. Teachers should learn how to approach a child by looking at his physical acts, if he sits all alone in recess, if he is too quiet,  we must know how to deal with it. Sometimes a child can be physically abused by his parents, and we as a teacher have to be aware. As future teachers, we must discuss how to make a separation between your students and your own private life. I hear many stories of teachers that take some student’s cases to their heart and it can hurt us and destroy us physically and mentally. I feel like it is super important for us , young student teachers , to know how to handle these situations before we even get to student teaching at first. I feel like when  I went for the first time into  my student teaching , I came with lots of knowledge, preparation, and material to work on but I didn’t have any tips on how to be a human with feelings towards students. We also didn’t learn how to deal with parents, which frustrates me a lot . Israeli parents are very tough , they tend to put everything against us before checking the child. Another thing we had not discussed was men teachers. Yoav and Noei are both men who study with us in college. Being a man teacher in the ministry of education is not that easy as it sounds , it’s even scary. Being a male teacher can put your life at risk which means ; with no purpose touching a student’s back can be a life threat. There were lots of stories about teachers sexually harassing students , we never know what truly happened and what is the story but we must discuss this issue in college. I truly feel like we are filled with many materials but the most important one is  not discussed.Student teachers should have a lecture for next year about just being a teacher in 2021’s society .

To improve student’s reading comprehension and writing , teachers must teach several strategies and methods that help them get to it . I think that one of the hardest parts of writing for students is getting started . Many students get stuck at the start and ask for help. The best way to teach writing is to teach them how to brainstorm topics to write about , have free writing, edit and summarize. I think that we , as student teachers , must have another course in more depth about teaching writing and reading strategies to our students. Writing can be very tough for us students also, being able to come up with rich vocabulary words can be hard. I think we should learn how to teach students to come up with ideas for writing , for example: teach metaphors , similes, and adjectives to engage the reader’s mind. I taught 5th graders a text about an e-mail. We read and understood that the text is about writing an E-mail to the principal about a student’s dream trip with his class. My class activity was to write your own persuasive e-mail to the principal about your dream trip. I had on my PowerPoint an example of an e-mail so the students can see in front of their eyes how to begin writing their e-mails. Little did I know how hard it was for them to find the right vocabulary and to connect them with the text they had to write about. I felt lost , I felt like I didn’t have enough teaching writing strategies for me to give them a writing task. I understood later on, before going into the writing , I had to give out some vocabulary lists so they can work with that list and combine their sentences together. Another thing I should’ve done was to summarize , organize and combine their thoughts and idea’s on the board and do a “demi” e-mail worksheet , so they can follow it and work on it all alone. Post-reading activities and their importance are incredible. Having reading teaching methods and strategies is very important for young learners to fully be engaged before, during and after reading. I think that most of my idea’s come from the internet, I didn’t feel like I had learned enough information about those reading and writing strategies. I think that it’s because of the way we learned it , via zoom and not frontally. Being on zoom and not able to discuss those important points frontally is very hard because learning to teach must be frontal, with facial expressions , combining ideas with your classmates and your lecturer. Jennifer did an amazing job and had given us all the tools needed but , I feel like teaching writing and reading strategies should be taught for a whole course in dept for next year. Especially when Israeli students learn English as a foreign language , these methods should be taught in more depth.