My first teaching practice what I learned

 My First Teaching Practice – What I Learned. 

I can remember my first teaching practice experience at Sumangala Boys' College, Pandaura, for a two-week block teaching session. In their I learned many things and those things helped me to improve as a teacher. First thing was planning a lesson and methodology lectures helped me a lot with that. I selected the lessons to teach, then prepared the learning outcomes to suit the competency level. At first, I didn't write the lesson plan in the book and drew a sketch on paper. Then I corrected it through peers and our lecture. I planned and designed activities for each stage of the lesson and allocated time for each stage.– I understood that planning lessons with clear objectives and time management is essential. I got to know that more time must be allocated for practising their learning. 

 I learned classroom management and realised how important it is to maintain discipline while keeping a friendly atmosphere. Questioning, eliciting, and positive eye contact, tone helped to manage the class. I learned creative ways to keep students engaged through games, visuals, stories and questions. It helped me to build my confidence when I taught some more lessons. My confidence improved with each lesson I delivered. I learned to be flexible and sometimes, things didn’t go as I planned, so I learned to adapt quickly. There were some instances in which I learned many things while teaching in my classroom. Feedback from my mentor and peers helped me improve. By observing others' lessons, I also learned a lot. I learned to use the visual aids correctly and effectively throughout the lesson, and how to manage the blackboard. 

The students' attention can be gained through different warm-up activities like songs, language games etc. Relating the new lessons to prior learning is also an important thing. I learned that activities like group work /pair work helped me break the monotony of the lesson, and they helped me teach my lesson effectively. The self-reflection helped me to improve a lot. I actually thought I could have done it this way, and I can react to such a problem in this manner, etc. Then I wrote a journal for every lesson, that is what I expected as a teacher, what actually happened in the classroom, and what I think about what happened in the classroom. Furthermore, it helped me to understand the learners with different skills and different knowledge levels. There were some technical issues when we went to turn on the Bluetooth speaker, while pasting posters and picture cards on the blackboard, but over time our crew were able to find solutions, and we were helping and advising each other for our future success. This is what I learned through my first teaching practice.  

You can share experiences with your first teaching practice and the things you learned. You can comment your ideas below. 

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Behind the scenes reflections 

When I wrote this post, I paid attention to my own teaching experiences as a novice teacher in the NCOE those days. I gained a lot of knowledge through my first teaching practice, and it laid the foundation for my teaching profession. It was a pleasure to work with my students and work collaboratively with peers those days.