A Reflection on My Teaching Practicum Experience

I can honestly say that participating in a teaching practicum experience at the end of my
TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) M.Ed. program at the University of
San Diego has been one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my life. Given
that I spent 23 years as a naval officer, and seven years as a logistics manager for an aerospace
defense corporation before enrolling at the University of San Diego, I’ve had a lot of interesting
and challenging assignments to compare. As I began to reflect on my experiences as a teacher
candidate, a quote attributed to President John F. Kennedy came to mind: “Any man who may
be asked in this century what he did to make his life worthwhile, I think can respond with a good
deal of pride and satisfaction, 'I served in the United States Navy.'" However, I would add to this
quote “and I became a TESOL teacher.”
Having spent many years serving my country and raising two sons, I decided I would
take advantage of my GI bill benefits and study French. After attending courses at a community
college, I enrolled at the University of San Diego and received my B.A. in French in 2020.
When that program ended, I decided to enroll in the M.Ed. TESOL program because I was
excited by the prospect of being able to teach both here and abroad. My parents had always
thought that I would make a good teacher, and thoughts of teaching had always been in the back
of my mind. I have loved to read since I was very young and I’ve always been interested in
different languages and cultures. I also wanted to be able to interact with people and help them
in a meaningful way. I decided to take the plunge and learn how to be a TESOL teacher.
In the past two years, I’ve met and made friends with wonderful people who I intend to
stay in touch with as we begin to disperse and embark on our teaching careers. One of the
reasons I wanted to teach was to be able to make a positive difference in the lives of people who
are in need of support and compassion. I understand at least some of the struggles that people
striving to learn a new language because of my experiences studying abroad. However my
struggles to communicate in a new language in a foreign country were limited and do not
compare with the struggles that many ESL students face as immigrants and refugees establishing
themselves in a new country.
In my final semester, it was time to begin to start putting theory and knowledge into
practice as a teacher candidate. I was placed in a credit/non-credit Speaking and Listening
course as well as a credit Introduction to Academic Writing course at a community college in
San Diego County. The courses began as distance learning courses in January because of the
COVID-19 pandemic, and then transitioned to in-person just before my placement at the end of
March. Although the course had transitioned to an in-person format, my mentor teacher
continued to teach some students on Zoom as she knew that they had no means of transportation
and would not otherwise be able to attend. This is just one of the many ways that my mentor
teacher adapted to the needs of her students.
In the early days of my placement, I was mostly observing. My mentor teacher was very
welcoming to me personally and in her introduction of me to the class. She asked the students to
introduce themselves by telling me a little bit about their backgrounds. I learned that the
students came from many different parts of the world. Their first languages were Russian,
Polish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese and Vietnamese. Some students were international
students while others were immigrants or permanent residents, and the age range of the students
varied. When students introduced themselves, I made note of their name and background. Some
students talked about their line of work and I made note in the event I needed to teach them using
an example that they would possibly be familiar with or relate to. My mentor teacher invited me
to dive in and begin to participate in the class from the very beginning. This was especially
important since my placement was delayed and I had much to do before the end of the semester.
To meet the practicum requirements I needed to teach 3-5 full lessons and be formally
observed and evaluated by three individuals. The observations and evaluations were conducted
by a member of my practicum cohort, a university liaison professor and my mentor teacher.
Thankfully, my mentor teacher encouraged me to begin teaching right away. She shared a
PowerPoint that she had created for a lesson and suggested that I start teaching after she made
announcements and did a warm-up. This experience went quite well and I was able to elicit
responses from the students which gave me confidence that the students would cooperate and
that it would go well for both myself and the students. For my next lesson, my mentor teacher
gave me the topic which was “Identity” and gave me some guidelines to work with as I created
my own slides for the lesson. I felt the lesson went well for the most part, however, it did get
bogged down at one point when a student began to ask several questions about the difference
between gender identity and sexual orientation. The student was having difficulty understanding
the concepts and I didn’t want to spend too much time on a topic that was complex and not
central to the overall objectives of the lesson. My mentor teacher intervened and said that we
could talk about these two categories again later in order to get back on-track.
For my formal observation and evaluation, I prepared a detailed lesson plan. The purpose
for the lesson was to give students an introduction to research. The students had already decided
on a research topic and my mentor teacher recommended that I look at their proposals on Canvas
(Learning Management System) so that I could incorporate their topics into the lesson. I had
already had the same idea and I was happy to do this to make the lesson more relevant and
meaningful for the students. For the warm-up, I asked students to define research in their own
words and then wrote their responses on the board. I was happy that several students were
speaking up and participating in class. Later in the lesson I introduced something called the
CRAAP test that students can use to determine the validity of sources when doing research.
CRAAP is an acronym that helps students remember to check for currency, relevance, authority,
accuracy and purpose. During my debrief my mentor teacher mentioned that I could have asked
students if they knew what CRAAP was, to inject a little humor into the lesson and help students
recognize a play on words, which I totally agreed with. One of the things that I admire about my
mentor teacher is that she is very relaxed and frequently laughing in the classroom. At the same
she also sets high expectations and includes culturally relevant material that is intellectually
stimulating. She exhibits many of the traits and characteristics I want to embody in my own
classroom.
One of the ways I believe that my lesson could have been improved was to have students
work in groups sooner so that they did not spend as much time watching me and responding to
my questions to the whole class. My mentor teacher gives the students ample opportunities to
work in groups or individually, thereby varying the pace and activities in class. I know that as a
student I really appreciate being able to transition to different activities and working with
different people. I also believe in letting students try out new language and new concepts in
small groups so they can feel more comfortable taking risks in a low-stake environment before
having to speak and be singled out in class. Another lesson I learned from my mentor teacher is
to how to slow the rate of speech down in YouTube videos. After introducing the CRAAP test,
the students watched a short video that explained each term. Some of the vocabulary was
difficult and the speaker spoke quickly. I made note of it so that I could make adjustments in the
future.
For the next class which was informally observed, I created a new lesson, the final lesson
on Identity. In it, we used a documentary called A Class Divided as source material. The
documentary is about a teaching experiment that a teacher, Jane Elliott, conducted in her third
grade classroom after Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. The students are divided
into either the blue-eyed group or the brown eyed-group. The blue-eyed group is told that they
are superior while the brown-eyed group is told that they are inferior, lazy and stupid. Brown-
eyed children are not allowed to play with the blue-eyed children who enjoy all sorts of
privileges. As my mentor teacher and I are both passionate about social justice issues, I was
thrilled to be able to create a class and lead it. After doing a warm-up, the students watched a
recent short video where Jane Elliot was interviewed by Jimmy Fallon about the experiment. I
remembered to slow the rate of speech down in the video, which was especially important for
this speaking and listening class where the students’ language skills are not as developed as those
in the writing class. After the video the students were put into groups and given a list of
questions to discuss. I was very happy to listen in on the conversations and participate in them.
I felt that this class went well, in part because it was about a topic that I’m passionate about and
the students seemed to be engaged.
Just as I seemed to be hitting my stride and learning how to provide more scaffolding
(support measures) for my students and to become more relaxed and not think about being
observed, it was time to end the practicum and get ready for the end of the semester. I feel very
fortunate to have been placed in a classroom with a mentor teacher who has so much experience
and talent. She picks interesting materials, she is warm and she is caring. She is flexible and she
is always striving to improve on her teaching. For example, she came and spoke to our
practicum class about a book she is reading about equitable grading. She allows her students to
make up late work throughout the semester and reminds them of this regularly. I think this is a
good practice for this student population. In doing so, she shows student that the grade they end
up with is largely up to them. As community college students they are adults and I think this
approach allows students to catch-up when they get sick or there is an unforeseen emergency.
We also want our students to be more autonomous and take more responsibility for their
learning.
One of the other big takeaways I learned from my teaching experience is the importance
of encouragement. As a teacher candidate, I was sometimes nervous when I was teaching and
being a bit hard on myself. Hearing my mentor teacher point out aspects of my teaching that
were effective gave me confidence in my ability to teach. I also appreciated her honest feedback
that helped me grow as a teaching professional. She gave me many practical suggestions that I
will carry with me in the field. Similarly, my practicum teacher and my university liaison were
both supportive and caring. I felt appreciated and honored to belong to a cadre of experts in the
field who not only want to teach ESOL but also teach novice ESOL teachers. I also grew close
with my practicum cohort. We created a WhatsApp group that enhanced our learning
experiences and I created a lesson for my Capstone curriculum research project that included
them. The name of the lesson is “From ESL Student to ESL Professor.” I was so inspired by
their personal journeys and their teaching ability that I wanted them to come and speak to my
students. I feel that this practicum course was the single most valuable course that I completed
in my M.Ed. program. Because of this experience I know I have colleagues and friends I can
count on if I have questions or a dilemma that I need to discuss. I am deeply grateful to have had
this experience.