Caitlin Sauvey
ESL/Spanish Instructor & Linguist

My Teaching Reflection

Hello and thank you for taking the time to look into myself and my abilities. This is Caitlin wanting to share the wonderful experience I had as a student teacher and what I was able to gain from it. This was the first time I ever taught in a classroom setting as well as it was completely virtual. I had the pleasure of teaching Venezuelan students with the biggest passion to learn English as a second language. It was exciting seeing myself growing alongside my students, them as the speakers and I like the teacher. After each lesson plan was reviewed or class observed, I reflected on the suggestions of my peers, as well as analyzed myself while teaching to see what should be changed or worked on before the next lesson. I have learned that teaching is not just about the objectives being met. It is about personal growth within students you will greatly impact. I still look up to my old teachers and professors, as their own passion and care for the class made me enjoy the material, no matter the subject. I wish to have this impact on many of my future classes, to perhaps be that peer to introduce them to a future career or even an enjoyable elective. No one student is the same, which is what makes each class I teach so unique and important to my journey as an English language teacher. My teaching will adapt to each class and each student I have because as a teacher, being open-minded to change and improvement is how I will best do my job.

As I reexamine my previous reflections from my lessons, I enjoy seeing the development I made in such a brief timespan. The observations I had on my peers and their classrooms also gave me ideas on how to improve my class to best teach my students. One of the biggest challenges my fellow teachers and I had to face was working in a classroom virtually with students across the world. Although we are in the technology era, there are still so many confusing aspects to using them or even having access to that tech depending on where you may be. There were issues with home countries having bad internet for weeks, preventing the students to stay the entire class or participate. I was thankful though that my students and their love for learning did not allow these hiccups to take away their motivation and interest. I also was able to use a new and amazing strategy by teaching as a team. My co-teachers and I really enjoyed this method of conducting a class, as it allowed more focus on each student and their comprehension of the lesson. We took on different roles, equaling out the load and aiding each other during the class, either by typing new vocabulary into the chat (aka our chalkboard), presenting the PowerPoint so the lecturing teacher could focus more on the students readying the next content, and etc. We were able to grow together as teachers, learning from and guiding one another as we all work towards our goals of impacting promising students. One of the things we were able to work on together was figuring out when was best to give feedback to our students, such as in that moment or add the mistake into the following lesson. We also were able to give advice on how to increase student talk time, something that is meant to be higher than teacher talking time. Although lectures are useful, teaching a language should include the language skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing, vocab, and grammar.

The most challenging aspect of this teaching practicum was creating lesson plans with the little time I had free. I want to give the best materials to my students but to do that every day requires a lot of personal time to get your lesson planned as you intend it to go. As I was a college student during this experience, I did have a lot of other classes, organizations, managed a café, and paying bills while trying to constantly make each class impactfully enjoyable. As I dip my feet into the costly and exhausting adult world, more challenges are brought to my feet, but as I am doing something I love, I feel like I could take on the world for my students. One of the things I enjoyed most about my teaching experience was hearing my students thank me for being a great and fun teacher. I am starting to become the teacher I have always wanted to be. Although my journey has just started, I am finally feeling the satisfaction of impacting those I teach. As all of my dearest friends and family have heard of this experience, I hope to tell them more as I follow my dreams of becoming an English foreign language teacher.