Reflection:
Overall I felt that our lesson on clothing went very well. I felt that Nancy, Kristen,
Janet and I made a great team because everyone put forth much effort and there was a sense of shared responsibility and cohesiveness. I especially enjoyed the collaborative planning process, which consisted of three group meetings, the exchange of several emails, and sharing our plans via a Google document. In general, I’m not fond of group work due to past experiences where the group was inefficient and the division of labor was unbalanced. However, this particular experience proved otherwise. There seemed to be a natural flow in the planning process where individual ideas contributed to a unified whole. Due to effective planning, the lesson was well organized and flowed together as if the same teacher had taught it.
In terms of the lesson itself, I thought it suited our context of adult ESL students well and it was fun to teach. In fact, I plan on keeping it and possibly teaching it to future students. The context we chose for team teaching was the polar opposite of the context I have used throughout this semester; my context was EFL children and this context consisted of ESL adults. Nevertheless, the principles in my teaching philosophy were still applicable to this context.
My portion of the lesson followed my first principle because I provided an activity that offered meaningful interactive discourse among students and I corrected students via integrated form-focused instruction (as opposed to providing them with isolated correction). I exercised my second principle by motivating the students and creating a sense of community through group work. This lesson was also in line with my

third principle because I introduced the students to the target language culture through
American movie stars and I also used technology by incorporating the virtual doll into my lesson. My fourth principle was evident in my lesson because I presented the material by relating it to students’ existing knowledge by use of schema activation. My “Dressing with the Stars” activity built on the previous knowledge that the students learned prior to my portion of the lesson to include clothing, activities, colors, and the sentence construction that they learned earlier in class. I provided schema activation by introducing an American movie star with whom students are already familiar with, Brad
Pitt. My fifth principle of encouraging learner autonomy through strategies training was the only principle that didn’t appear in my lesson. The fact that I applied four out of the five of my teaching principles to an entirely different context shows that my principles are not only applicable to an adolescent EFL context, but may also be used in a variety of other contexts.
In my last microteaching assignment peer feedback, an individual consultation with Dr. Sardegna, and my own observations of myself through video revealed my weakness in relation to eliciting responses from students as well as providing clear instructions on what to do. For this group microteaching lesson, I focused on improving my teaching in these two areas in particular. Our group met at Kristen’s house on
Saturday in order to do a trial run of our lesson. This proved beneficial to me because my group helped me to brainstorm ideas, which helped me to improve my eliciting techniques. This trial run also gave me more practice in reference to giving clear instructions, which in turn boosted my confidence. I feel that at this point in my teaching career, actual practice is beneficial. However it is my belief that there will come a time

when this sort of practice won’t be necessary because eliciting responses from students and giving clear instructions will become second nature to me. Based on peer feedback along with another individual consultation with Dr. Sardegna, it was evident that I showed remarkable improvement in these areas when compared to my last teaching assignment.
I received additional positive feedback regarding the activity “Dressing with the
Stars,” among which one peer stated that it was a “perfect game,” another peer “loved the activity,” and still another said it was a “cool matching game.” From these responses it is clear that this was a winning activity in terms of interest level. There was other positive feedback in regards to my pace and giving clear instructions where six out of nine stated that I had given clear instructions and two went on to comment on my pace, which they deemed appropriate. I also received positive feedback on my monitoring during the activity. I was glad to see that this didn’t go unnoticed since I am now a proponent of integrated form-focused instruction that occurs during meaningful communication tasks.
Not only did my peers provide me with positive feedback about my lesson, Dr.
Sardegna did as well. Positive affirmations from Dr. Sardegna meant a lot to me, as she has a critical eye when it comes to details. Dr. Sardegna commended me on my eliciting and said that this time around it was “perfect”. She also pointed out that I have a “good teaching style” and that my lesson was well organized and flowed well.
Although I received an outpouring of positive feedback from my peers as well as
Dr. Sardegna, I also received some constructive feedback that I will want to take into account in future lessons. During my planning process, I thought about what responses to

elicit after the activity was finished in order to check comprehension as well as to give students another opportunity for practice. Therefore, I decided to go around the room and ask each student what the actor/actress they found wears, in which they are to respond,
“He/she wears X.” During the lesson, my questions and student answers felt contrived because my question and their required answers weren’t actually grammatically correct.
Dr. Sardegna brought this up to me in our discussion after class. She pointed out that the objective of the activity was to have students construct an activity in which they describe what someone wears when they routinely do a particular activity. However, I used this construction to describe a picture of an actor/actress; in that case I clearly used the wrong tense! I will want to be more careful in the future so that I don’t teach my students incorrect forms. At the time of my lesson I was trying to only use the forms that they had learned about and by doing that I ended up using the wrong form. In the future, I will use the correct tense even if they have not been introduced to it (in this case the present continuous tense). Since this lesson went well and I plan on using it again in the future, I will want to make sure to convey to the students the fact that this sentence construction communicates a sense of frequency and routine.
Some other things that came up in my discussion with Dr. Sardegna were in reference to teaching culture. I could incorporate culture into my class by introducing the vocabulary of clothing that students wear in their country of origin (for example a sari, veil, tunic, etc.). I thought this was a great idea! She also said that when I introduced the actors I could have asked the students to tell me which movies these actors appear in.
I’m glad to have had a second opportunity to receive feedback and to reflect once again in order to further perfect my teaching. This second experience proved as

informative as the first, if not more so. I believe that my teaching may always be improved upon and through reflection I will continue to refine my teaching.