I taught my first TESOL teaching training course this semester. Although I was not hired to teach this type of class, my boss (who taught it in the past) has been busy with other duties and asked me to take over the course this year. It was a great experience and enabled me to combine my experience teaching educational psychology with all of my ESL teaching experience. The disadvantage is that class preparation for this course was intense and it ate up a lot of my time, leaving me with little time for feedback. Additionally, this course was WAY over enrolled and I was only able to scare away enough students to get it down to 27 participants. Still, I’m grateful for this teaching opportunity, and the course evaluation feedback from students can be found below.
I structured the evaluation form into 3 parts:
- Learning
- Instruction
- Curriculum
In Learning, I asked students to rate the major learning activities:
- Personal statement of teaching philosophy
- Lesson plans
- Online discussion forums
- Observation report
CRIERTIA
In general, students found the assignments to be useful and appropriately challenging. Although they did not view them as overly fun, they did not dislike them either. This is represented in the chart below.
LEARNING ACTIVITIES
The following graph demonstrates how most of the activities were valued by the students, they did not enjoy or appreciate the online discussion questions to the same degree that they liked the other assignments.
Students seemed to appreciate the flexibility of the assignments, and enjoyed the practical nature of the lesson plans and observation reports. One student used the flexibility of the learning contract to adjust the assignments in order to conduct a research report on language acquisition in place of the observation reports (which were essentially completed anyway, as nearly all students in the course volunteered with the VISAS international student/classroom pairing program). Overall, students felt that assignments helped them to learn and put into practice the principles we discussed in class and from the textbook.
In the course evaluation, one student noted that the listening/speaking lesson plan was harder than the reading/writing one. I’m not sure whether this was because the nature of the task was easier, or whether the students found it that it was easier to do the second lesson plan after the experience of learning to create a first one. I’ll have to make note of this and prepare students for this reality: lesson planning gets easier the more we do it.
ONLINE DISCUSSION FORUMS
It was good to know that overall the students feel good about the learning activities. Even early in the semester, I sensed frustration with the Collab discussion online forums. I tried to adjust the questions so that they were more self-reflective rather than simply textbook checks, but as one student mentioned during his final interview, that only served to make the questions easier so that students didn’t even need to read the text in order to answer the questions. I think that in the future, I would use JIT (Just in Time) teaching style questions that would encourage students to do the reading ahead of time, and then include one self-reflection question. When my wife and I used JIT for educational psychology courses that we taught, in general, students appreciated the questions and the in-class feedback.
TEXTBOOK
I would also consider looking into other texts. Although the book worked and was practical (what most students were looking for), one student noted that it “was dry.”
INSTRUCTION AND FEEDABCK
The next graph suggest that of all the three evaluands (Learning Activities, Instruction, and Curriculum Topics), students most highly praised the instruction of LING 509.
In rating the course instruction, students praised the efficient use of class time, organization, respectfulness, and knowledge. Their comments included phrases such as:
- Great mixod practical and theoretical
- I loved this class
- Thanks for being so organized
- My favorite class each week
- Great teaching methods
- Amazing class – thank you
- The instructor shares an enthusaism for teaching, learning, and TESOL. I wish all my instructor could be like him
- Instructor was VERY knowledgeable on the subject
- It is evident that the instructor carefully prepared for each class session
- One of the best experiences during my university education
- I would recommend this course to all
However, as expected, students recognized that the instructor did a poor job of providing timely feedback. In fact, one student indicated that the course was a complete success – except for the lack of feedback. Due to a number of factors, I found it very difficult to offer regular feedback. I tried to analyze the source of these problems and came up with this list:
- large class size: due to administrative pressures from my boss and the study abroad program, I over enrolled this class.
- new teaching responsibilities: in addition to LING 509, I taught other classes including one I had not taught before.
- flexible assignment dates: although I provided suggested due dates for assignments, I allowed students the flexibility to submit assignments on their own schedule. This meant that I never got into a groove for assessing/providing feedback until the end of the semester immediately before final interview with students which is where the majority of individualized feedback was given – too late for most class members that are used to formative grades throughout the semester.
I was glad to see that students sense the same weakness in my instruction that I also recognized. In the future, I would like to develop rubrics for the assignments with the students so that feedback and assessment can be a semester-long activity.
CURRICULUM
Finally, students provided feedback on the curriculum. The following charts indicate the degree that students felt that the curriculum was interesting, met their expectations, and applied to their future career or academic goals. Higher number indicate greater agreement with each statment.
The following two charts indicate the degreethat students found the workload and flexibility of the course appropriate. Ratings in the middle of the scale suggest that students felt the course displayed the appropriate level of workload/flexibility. Ratings of too flexible/easy are to the left, and too rigid/difficult are to the right.
SUMMARY
Overall, this course seemed to be a success. I enjoyed being the instructor of a teacher preparation course in addition to my ESL teaching responsibilities. The students of the course also seemed to feel that the course was a succes. The end of semester evaluation helped me to clearly identify two area for improvement in the future: revision of the online forum questions, and the need for formative feedback to students.
