One of my greatest challenges here so far is lesson planning. Before coming to Japan, I had next to no teaching experience. I taught German to kids at a camp one summer and I took a 3-day teaching English workshop at UPenn last year. That’s about it. So I really have no idea how to plan a class. And I’m expected to come up with activities for just about every class here. This is quite the challenge.
The hardest part is trying to think of something that won’t bore my students out of their minds. Japanese students tend to be rather quiet and passive in class as it is and I’m learning that it takes a fair amount of effort to get them to do anything, let alone have fun with it. I’m trying to introduce games to liven things up a bit, but sometimes it’s hard to come up with an activity that will not only be engaging and fun, but that will also teach them something.
The other major problem I’m having with lesson planning is making it level-appropriate. I have a lot of students (about 315) and I don’t know them nearly well enough yet to know exactly what their abilities are. So in many cases I have some students finish well before others. And then they start sleeping/talking/god knows what else. I’m still working on how to deal with this (both in terms of preventing it happening in the first place and also in terms of directing their energy/focus when it does happen).
It’s getting better. Slowly. I’m slowly learning what level my students are at and what types of activities get them going. (Hint: Bribe them. Having a treat for the winning team, etc. seems to work like magic, though unfortunately I can’t do that every time.) Hopefully soon I will get to the point of actually having my kids engaged and excited during class. Wouldn’t that be great?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I had a rough enough time planning one 1-hour lesson each week for my CCD kids, I can't imagine how tough it must be to teach high schoolers all day long with no formal teacher training. Hang in there- you will be great :-)
ReplyDelete