Hello, everyone
I'm interested in hearing from my peers and seniors, you all, about how a successful team-teaching, or ALT-led class is run.
Please respond with, best case, examples or, that failing, ideal hypotheticals we can discuss at length hopefully?
The following is just detail and background. Please skip it, if you like.
After a year and half as an ALT teaching at 4 SHSs, I feel like my lessons are becoming progressively worse each week, up to the point that I currently feel I've failed miserably at this job.
Using Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas as the listening section in a lesson is a new low for me and I sense the bottom is close.
I'm not looking for pick-me-ups or excuses or easy ways out; I just feel like some constructive input and examples of good team-teaching classes would help greatly to provide a new a base for future lessons. I'm not out to steal your lessons plans, either! I'd just like to pick your brains on this. ALL OF THE BRAINS!
The current formula, as requested by my supervisors (which usually consists of PowerPoint, worksheet and some kind of "fun" activity to practice the content if time permits), is not working - many students sleep, talk amongst themselves, just, in general, don't pay attention and by the time the "fun" activity swings by only a few seem to still be interested.
And, even though I do do this on occasion, I'm really against playing a game for the whole lesson, although, they are sometimes great supplements to learning - Jeopardy works really well as part of a multi-topic review lesson, for instance.
Most of the schools I teach at (3/4) are labelled as "low-level" which I feel is disgustingly unfair to the students, but that's a topic for another thread entirely, and something way out of my control.
Having said that, though, my JTEs usually request lessons which are mostly vocabulary based, and while I might be teaching the students a few new words, I don't feel like that's enough, because they haven't been taught how to properly formulate their own sentences.
So it's kinda like giving bits of an assemble-it-yourself deck chair sans instruction manual to someone who doesn't know how to use a drill, glue or a screwdriver.
They can identify all the pieces of wood and plastic and screws but can't put it all to together.
The lessons where I have been ambitious and proactive and tried to teach a useful grammar point to enable students to create authentic content, have all hit far below the mark, and that's one of the things I'm hoping to address.
Perhaps I'm just being way too difficult and unrealistic here? Maybe I should actually be happy with this... I dunno...
ALT teaching and teaching a foreign language to students in Japan are new to me, but I taught EFL to foreign students back home for 2 years and had far greater success with that than I am at the moment.
I'd appreciate all your input and thoughts on this.
Thank you in advance!