Thank you everyone for this morning’s little reunion! It was nice to challenge ourselves on teaching grammar with other students I think cause we can be critical about it.
I think my experience went pretty well. Highlights for me were that I was able to speak quite clearly and using the whiteboard to write down main informations. My whiteboard looked pretty nice and organised by the end so I’m happy with that. The one thing I didn’t really do that were part of the instructions was the drilling part but as I said, since there was no trick or contractions in my sentences I didn’t really see how to do it with you guys, I would have definitely done it if you were beginners though just to show rhythm and pronunciation at least. It was an interesting experience and I agreed with your “critiques” at the end so thank you!

Hey guys, I’m putting myself on the n.6 (Past continuous) 🙂

Thank you Gifty and Paul for another good video call. It is always good to get to do these tasks as a group and be able to get criticized on our work! On my part, I’m pretty happy that I was able to read off my DIMTS entirely, even though it can get a bit strange to be talking to a sheet of paper… I think my instructions were clear enough since you two played the activity as I had planned it. Little note to myself : « animal » is a very large topic so telling you we will be playing the game until one of you cannot come up with a word, without adding a time limit was not a good decision on my part – as we could have played the game for hours. I should have either been more specific on a tighter topic, or give you a time limit to give your answer (for example, you each have 5 seconds to come up with a word).

[Just copying back my comment from the 10/05 here as you asked so it makes more sense]

This task was very interesting to do not only to exercise and practice some teaching skills but also to get to know each other! We were three students on the Zoom call and we all came up with very different things to teach which made it even more exciting. From Psychology and social concepts, the culture and general information about an other country, to an easy go-to breakfast recipe.

I decided to teach the other trainees the pancake recipe that I came up with over the past two years to serve my daughter a nutritious yummy first meal before going to school, knowing that we are on a “military” morning schedule over here and it cannot use up too much time! It was fun to share and obviously very easy to talk about since it is an every day happening recipe. I found the other trainees interested in my speech. I think I can say I was clear enough on explaining every step since there was not any questions at the end and I was told it was a nice and very detailed presentation. Although I brought in all the tools to match them with the vocabulary words, I did not ask them if there were any questions at any point so that is probably something I should think about for next time. Overall I am happy with what I’ve learned and what I taught, and they even said it made them hungry by the end!

Hi Paul,
Thank you again for your “Teach me Anything Task”! I enjoyed that you decided to teach us something you usually teach your students in class, it was a good idea to start with as it seemed evident how comfortable you were with the concept. I thought it was good that you used some gesture as well to explain what you were saying as it was definitely a challenging concept to understand for us (not being in the same field as you). For a first lesson, I would have probably gone for an easier thing to explain though… And I enjoyed that the dialogue was open with us to ask questions at the end too!

First of all, I really enjoyed this activity as you both could tell!!! The instructions were clear and you definitely followed the DIMTS structure which is great, but maybe you didn’t need to read those off to us word for word (ie « so for the dynamic… », « for the instructions… », i think this would all be part of « mental language » as it was explained in the Teacher Language lesson?). Otherwise it was good, your examples helped making sense of all of it and they were well chosen in my opinion. I would say that this activity would probably be more fun for a small group of 3/4 people as it was suggested than just 2 people playing it but it still worked well and we both got to the right answer which is always satisfying!!

I agree entirely with all of that, thank you for the feedback! Regarding your instructions task, I would say everything was quite clear and simple, and I could really tell you used the DIMTS structure which was good. I would add that for the « M » part, you gave us an example with talking (ie asking a question + giving the answer), you could have also wrote on a piece of paper an example of the notes you could have been taking for this discussion specifically so we knew how to take notes if we were your students. Although I still understood it and took my notes following my way on this side.