POST-TEACHING SELF EVALUATION FORM  

Please answer the following questions after you complete Final Teaching Task.

What were the strong aspects of your teaching? What are the points that you are happy with in your teaching experience?

First of all, I am quite happy to have been able to implement the whole lesson plan. Almost all of the activities were carried out with no rush, and this has enabled us to achieve all of our intended goals and objectives. Secondly, I really liked the idea of having been able to lead our learners to question their existing knowledge on the related topic, as I believe teaching is something far beyond just loading the learners with the curriculum. Trying to give them a hand throughout their self-actualization processes, for instance, is a responsibility of ours as well.

If you had a chance to re-do the Teaching Task, what are the things you would change? What were the aspects of the activity or your teaching that could be/need to be re-designed if you had a second chance?

I guess, one of the first most important aspects of the lesson I would like to change would be the introduction/ice-breaker of the lesson. It unfortunately didn’t work on the learners in the way we had thought it would, resulting in the confusion of the learners. We could have informed the learners on the upcoming activity instead of leaving them without a single clue. Secondly, the introduction of the idiom was a complete failure as well. Instead of providing the learners with a similar Turkish idiom and wanting them to think of an English version of it, we could have provided them with the idiom itself and expect them to guess what it might mean in Turkish. In this way, we could have avoided challenging them with an idiom which most probably doesn’t exist in their mental lexicon, but we would have asked them to recall something they know through their native language input.

What are some of the issues mentioned in your mentor’s feedback? How do you respond to these comments?

In addition to the above mentioned two weaknesses, several additional points have been critized as well. As this teaching was the final one, our course instructor herself provided us with some feedback. She critized my providing the learners with just the right and wrong answers during the T/F activity. As a result of this, some learners might have been left with some question marks on their minds, which is of course not a good thing. Apart from these weaknesses she also touched upon our constant switch to Turkish, which was in most of the cases unnecessary. She implied that if we don’t encourage our learners to try to speak in English, this means that we don’t have enough faith in them.