VII. Self-assessment / Recommendations

By Silvia Castillo

My experience was very amazing, excited and wonderful because when I started to teach I didn't know how to teach, how to talk in front of other people or what to do in my classes. But when I was preparing my classes I realized that teach is not easy if we want to be a very good teacher we have to work hard and also don't be stingy because you have to share your knowledge with someone else. Although working with children can be challenging but if you do it with passion, interest and with energy you are going to see your job like a hobby and not like a job. And I can do a self-assessment and evaluation of my own learning in this course which can help me writing some recommendations to better this teacher training course

 I will mention the strengths I realized that I have in relation to teaching during my teaching practice.

I realized that reading so much and preparing my classes in an orderly manner helps me with fluency while speaking when I develop my classes. And Preparing my working material to use in the class in advance helped me to increase the level of creativity as I developed my class.

Some weaknesses that affected my teaching practice was the lack of resources. And also, can be that I hadn't the enough experience to teach. But that didn't was a reason for no continue doing my best and to work hard.

Some recommendations to better this teacher training course would be:

Provide an example of how to do our kindergarten practicum.

To do many classes about how create the lesson plans and how put it in practice at the time of our teaching practicum. 

By Carlos Santamaria

Those two months, I learned a lot because my students were very curious, so they asked me many things in my classes; I had to search for some words which I did not know. Also, I could find my myself like a teacher because before my teaching practice, I was not sure about being a teacher. My group of students could help to realize that I have some teacher characteristics. For example, I have the ability to speak in front of a group of people and have a good tone of voice, but the most important is that I am very patience; it is one the most important characteristic that a teacher needs. Also, I learned many techniques to teach young learners, and I could applicated many of them in my classes.

Some recommendations to better this teacher training course would be:

In my opinion, the only thing that can be better this course is more explanation of some easy warm-ups which students can use in their classes; in my case; I had to look for some warm ups on internet, but it is not the same than a teacher explains to you how to make those warm ups. Something that I enjoyed in that course was that we had many presentations, so my speaking skills were improved by those presentations.

By Rafael Sintigo

This course has been one of the most productive subjects for me because I have learned important things about teaching and learning. I consider this subject so important since someone can manage and know a lot about the language, but if he or she cannot teach or does not like to teach, he or she is going to do a bad job. Now, I already know that I have to be pretty sure if I want to be a teacher or not; I know the big responsibility that it has. Therefore, if I want to achieve to be a successful teacher, I must work hard and never give up.

At the very beginning of this course, I thought that this subject was going to be something boring and unimportant; however, then, I realized that this subject was very useful for my own learning. Now, I think that this course changed many things that I had in mind, and I am sure that if I put into practice all the things learned in this course, I will be able to make a wonderful job when I teach others.

There was an activity that I enjoyed the most, and it was teaching kids because it was the most real experience that I had as a teacher. I enjoyed everything that I did with them, and I learned a lot from that experience. Also, I think that the teacher plays an important role in students learning, so in this course the teacher encourage me a lot because now, I know what I have to improve to be better in life as student and then as a teacher. I already know my weaknesses and strengths in which I will work to improve and get the successful learning.

Generally, I consider that this course was excellent because I learned a lot in few days. I think that something that may help is to organize the time better in order to develop all the topics correctly. Also, to develop activities related to the topic that is being studied can help the students to understand better.

by Franklin Aldair

In my assessment, I am really happy to finish this course; I think that I could find my vocation; I could find my complete purpose in life. At the moment to star this course, I did not know if I had to become a teacher, but after these months, I feel excited because I realized that I love teaching to children. I understood that feeling in my teaching practicum; also, I did other activities like dramas and presentations. My group dramatized the sleeping beauty. Many of us enjoyed perform this drama. In my case, I got funny and learned new vocabulary. The only activity that I did not enjoy was the presentation of powtoon because in this presentation we had to learn how to use the program of powtoon, and in my case, it was difficult because I did not have a computer, and only one of my classmates had a computer; for that reason, we had to go to the cyber and spend some money. I consider that it was too many work for only one activity, and all the group of didactics spent a lot of time doing this activity; we could present another activity. I had prefered to do a discussion of the problems that students in kindergarten have. We could look for solutions and in this way, we could use less time that in the presentation of the books; for example, we could form two groups of five people and present our points to solve the most common problems.

 In addition to that, I enjoyed the explanations of the teacher during the course because she always spoke clearly about what means being a teacher and the responsibility that we have to take about it.

 By Marcos Hernandez 

This course was such an important and interesting opportunity to learn the principles for teaching very young learners, which was the main aim of this subject. Also, through this course I had the opportunity to learn how to use important tools as Powtoon, which is a useful tool that I didn`t even know that it existed.

Recommendations to better this course

On the other hand, I could say that to better this course, we could have done more interesting activities like dramas or something like that in order to make us be more interested in the contents. Besides that, I can say that everything was good. I liked the relationship that we could build with the teacher and among the classmates as well.