Reflections

1. Reflective Papers
Reflection #1
First Week at School
The first week in the school was considered as an introduction to the new experience
of teaching. We had been introduced to the school, its mission and vision, and
teachers. Moreover, we were told about our duties and responsibilities, the grade that
we are going to teach and the curriculum.
Then, we met the senior teacher and she told us about the substitution timetable and
teachers' shifts of the morning assembly. Then, I met my cooperative teacher and I sat
with her and talked and she told me about the classes that I will teach also we talked
about the students’ level in English. I looked to the textbooks and went over the topics
to get clear idea and to be ready to teach. I met the students they were very kind and
cute. I introduced myself to them and they introduced themselves to me. I attended
two lesson with my cooperative teacher to observe and see her style in teaching and
the methods that she used also to see the students. In the last day of week one I
attended a class with an expert English teacher.
Expert teacher is one of the richer source of acquiring knowledge and experiences
about teaching. I attended many lessons with English language teachers and I noticed
that teaching a language is extremely different from the other subjects, it requires so
many things, therefore, attending classes with expert teachers help me a lot.
One of the class that I observed was grade 7 and it was reading lesson. The number of
the students were 37, which is a big number. However, the teacher managed the class
successfully. The lesson was very interesting; the teacher used different techniques to
help students in reading. First, she started the lesson by asking the students about their
holiday and what they did; the students interacted with the teacher. Then, she showed
them a short video to guess the topic of the lesson, which was about inventions and
inventors. The teacher elicited answers from the students and most of the students'
answers were right. The teacher asked the students if they know some inventors and
most students answered. Then, the teachers showed the students some pictures of
inventors and asked the student if they knew them and what they had invented, the

2. students were very engaged. After that, the teacher asked the students to read the
instaurations and the title. She asked different students to read the texts loudly. It was
a good idea because the texts were short and easy to follow. Then, after reading the
text, she asked the students some questions about the texts to make sure that the
students understand that texts. It is worth to mention that the teacher emphasized that
students should use skimming as sub-skill to find the answers. Then, the teachers
played a game with the students, which is to match the inventions with its inventors,
and asked the students to work in-group and the best group will take a gift. The
students were very engaged in the game. It was very interesting.
From observing this class, I think that one of the challenges in reading lesson is how
to maintain students' engagement and motivation during the whole lesson. However,
the topic was not that interesting; the teacher can make it more interesting to the
students by relating the topic to students' life. In addition, l learned how to manage the
time and the class.
I felt it was a long and hard week because it was the beginning and I needed to take
time to be familiar to this new experience. I learned different things and I met new
people and the most important thing that I liked my teacher and my students. I were
planning to achieve my goals and got more experiences.

3. Reflection #2
Fifth Week at School
In this week, I got into the experience; I started teaching. It was a good beginning for
me. I started preparing for my classes, designing tasks, and making lessons plan.
Before week five, when I was teaching, my cooperative teacher attended with me to
see my style in teaching, skills and my strengths and weakness, however, from this
week I started to teach the students by myself because she told me about the things
that I should focus on and how I get my students engaged. She told me that I am ready
to teach them now because I kept learning from her and l knew what I do. Moreover,
she liked my teaching style and the activities and games that I gave my students.
On Sunday of this week, I taught a writing class about holiday. The students worked
in-group, talking about their holiday and what they did. Moreover, I observed one
class of my cooperative teacher and it was a writing class. On Monday, also, I taught
a class and I gave them a short task. The task was about rewriting sentences using
capital letter and punctuations. Then, I played with them a game, which was about
ordering letters to get a full sentence. In addition, I attended a class of one of my
colleague. I think that peer observation is the best way of exchanging ideas,
experience, techniques and learning from each other. Together we can discuss and
share all of our strengthens and weaknesses in teaching. I attended a class with one of
my colleague and the class was speaking class. The teacher stated the lesson by
asking students about their future jobs and students were very exciting to talk about
future jobs. It was fun and interesting because the students took the big part of talking
and the teacher just gave them comments. This was a good way, which enable
students to talk and express their selves. Then, the teacher askes students to open the
book and read the rubric & instructions text of activity 1 and she gave them a specific
time to finish the task, which was a good point. The teacher was going around and
saw the students. After that, the teacher askes one student to tell the class what they
were going to do in this activity. Then, the teacher asked the students some questions
to make sure that they understood the task.
The task was about talking about their personality. The teacher asked students if they
could tell the class about their personality. The students were very interested on this

4. topic and their interactions with teacher is a good point to highlight. Most of the
students were able to talk about their personality and which job is suitable for them.
Although the task had some difficult words, the students helped each other to
understand these words.
I liked the teacher way in introducing this interesting topic to the students. She used
different techniques to encourage and motivate students to interact and talk such as
she showed them a short video about different personality with beautiful pictures. In
addition, she brought different colors and she analyzed students' personality through
their favorite colors. Although there were side talk in the class, the teacher knew how
to keep the students in focus. At the end of the lesson, the teacher gave students a
homework, which was brought a picture of a person they liked and talked about
her/his personality.
By the end of this week, I felt that I learned a lot and I gave my students my best. I
wished that I will complete all the semester like this.

5. Reflection #3
Week 7 at School
Through this experience, I started to achieve my goals one by one. I went through
different lesson and challenges, I got the benefits from them, and I learned how to
overcome the challenges. During this week, I entered the second third unit and it was
about "Growing up". It was a long unit that required from students to know the
different life cycle of different animals as well as to be able to talk about different
animals. I started the unit by showing them a shot video about animals' life cycle and I
asked them to guess the title of the unit. I designed different tasks to make the lessons
interesting to the students I brought different pictures of animals and asked students to
draw the life cycle of these animals. Moreover, in this unit, the students are required
to know the words that used for time sequence and when we used them such as "first,
second, next, after that, and finally". After, I taught them these words and we
answered the questions in the skills book, I designed a task for the students to make
sure that the students understood them. The task joined between this unit and the
pervious unit in which the topic of the task was about writing about what they do after
school by using the time words sequence.
My cooperative teacher attended with me a class and gave me comments. I learned a
lot from these comments. First, she knows the students better than me so we sat and
talked before I did my lesson; she gave me some facts about the students and their
level in English. After I did the lesson, which was about talking about what students
do after school, we sat and talk; she told me about the good and bad points. She said
that I have good communication skills with the students and I have a great idea in
designing tasks. Moreover, she said that the lesson was very interesting and the
atmosphere was very educational, however, there were some students did not enjoy
and they kept talk during the lesson and she asked me to change their places later. In
addition, she told me that I have to write the objectives of the lesson in the board
before every lesson and always recapped the pervious lesson. She liked the idea when
I brought some pictures about my schedule after school and I started told the students
about my activities which was a good point to teach students how to speak and in
which tense. Moreover, she mentioned that the idea of giving students papers and

6. asked them to draw about their activities after school was very useful and students
were very interested on the task. She commented that this was very helpful task since
all the students had the opportunity to talk.
She also commented that before every task I had to make sure that all the students got
the idea of the task and what they had to do in that task. At the end, she said that she
liked the lesson since she found it interesting and my ways in explaining the lesson
were very excited. What is important to mention is that students were very active and
focus. In addition, the teacher said that I had good skills and knew how to manage the
class and the time. She liked my style in giving students opportunity to work
individually and work in-group.
In addition, in this week I attended two-substitution lessons. The first one was in
grade six. I sat with them and talked about different topics and they introduced
themselves and we played a game, which was about completing the missing words in
the sentences. I liked the students; they were very kind and active. The second lesson
was in grade seven. I introduced myself to them and they introduced themselves to me
as well. Them, I showed them a short film about "Snow White" the students were
very excited.

7. Reflection #4
Week 10 at School
This week was very fast, I felt that I was very busy and there was no time to finish all
the works. In this week, I collected all the skills book of the two class and they were
72 books and I had to correct them all. I spentn3 days in correcting them and wrote
notes for the students because some of them did not do all the tasks that we took. As
well as I collected the exercise books of the two class and I corrected them all.
Moreover, I designed different tasks for the students to improve their grades. The
topics of this week were about places around the words. Students were required to
know the famous things about different places around the world. The students loved
the topics a lot, some of them brought famous objects and pictures of different places,
and I gave them a chance to talk about them. One task that I gave to the students was
about draw a picture of something special in your town and then they had to talk
about it in 2 minutes. Another task was about how to write a paragraph, so I made the
way of writing a paragraph like making a burger. The students were very excited to do
the task and they asked me to bring burgers for them.
In addition, in this week I attended with an expert English teacher who teach grade 9.
It was a grammar lesson about past simple and past prefect. First, the teacher told the
students what they were going to learn in the lesson.
Teacher askes the students what they did yesterday and highlight the verb that they
used and tell them in which tense were that verbs. Most of the students got the right
answer which is past tense. Then, the teacher asked the students "What do you know
about past perfect?" because students had already learned the past perfect. One
students answered that past perfect have to be two actions and some students were not
active might be not remembering the rule and when to use it. After that, the teacher
gave students sheets pf papers, which had sentences and questions. She told the
students that they have 5 mints to complete the sheets. She walked around the class
and supported and guided the students. When the students finished, she asked them to
exchange their paper with their friends and to correct the papers. Most of the students
got full mark that means that the paper helped them to remember the rule of past
perfect. Thus, the teacher spent less time revising the rule after the activity.

8. Then the teacher gave them another task, which was showing them pictures, and the
students had to say the sentences that described the pictures using past perfect. The
students were very active and loved the task. In addition, in grammar tasks, she let
students answer questions individually and then she checked their answers by doing
the exercises in groups.
In the remaining time, the teacher was providing the students with feedback on their
level and the progress that they had make. I think that was very helpful and it could
direct students' attention to their strengthens and weakness. I noticed that the teacher
was very accurate in timing, which I like it. Before every task she told the students the
time.
I felt that I achieved a lot in this week and until now; I am very satisfied of what I do.
Moreover, I feel that my students love me and they love to learn English. they tried
hard to study and achieve more.

9. Reflection #5
Week 13 at School
This was a very fast week, everyone is busy, and everyone wants to complete
everything before the end of the semester. In this week, I felt so tried with the lots of
work. I was running to finish all the tasks and correct all the papers and books. It was
the last week of doing the presentation; so I reminded my students and I chose
Tuesday is the last day for presentations. On that day, I took an extra lesson to finish
all the presentations. Moreover, I spent some time with some students who had some
difficulties and helped them. I designed extra tasks for them in order to improve their
grade.
In this week, my cooperative teacher attended with me a class. The lesson was about
time. One comment was that the warm up activity was not very good and not
interesting because I put the time poster in the board and asked the students if they
knew how to read time. She told me that showing them a cartoon video about the time
would be a good idea to stat the lesson because the topic was not that much
interesting. Another comment was about teaching students how to read time, she liked
my way when I drew a clock in the board and asked the students to drew in their
exercise book and asked them to follow me and then I gave them the opportunity to
work by their selves. Moreover, she commented on the way I explained the task for
the students, she said that it was a good idea that you repeated many times of what
they were going to do in that task because some students did not get it from the first
time.
The other comment was about the game when I showed students some cards which
had time and asked them to read the time and the group who answered correctly they
will have a star. She said that was very useful and interesting game because the
students were very excited and it was a good way to make sure that the students were
able to read the time. In addition, she liked the way of explaining the listening task
because I put it on the TV to make it easy for the students to follow it. She said that
she would apply this idea in her class because she noticed that the student understood
the task and followed it easily.

10. I keep learning from all comments that my teacher gave me. I tried to design more
interesting tasks and games that will help the students to love the lesson and to learn
more. At the end of this week, I gave back the test paper to the students and discussed
with them the answers.

11. Reflection #6
Week 14 at School
This week was the ending week of the experience. I learned many things. I suffered
and I got angry because of time pressure and other things but I realized that all these
difficulties and challenges I faced were a turning point for me to become more and
experienced in this area. During this week, I had all finished all the students' grades
and I designed tasks for them for the finals. I did many revisions for them to make
sure that they understood the requirements.
To this moment, I were proud of what I had accomplished and of all the support and
encouragement that I gave for my students. I sat with my cooperative teacher and we
discussed all my works during the 14 weeks. She told me that she was very proud of
me and she said that I made a big difference in the students. Moreover, she told my
about the tasks that I designed for the students, they were very useful and they helped
the students a lot.
In this week, I attended a class with my colleague, which was writing class. The
teacher started the class by drawing mind map on the board about the advantages and
disadvantages of living in city and village. Then, she asked them to give her some of
these advantages and disadvantages. The students were very interested on this topic
and they interacted with the teacher. After that, the teacher told the students that they
were going together to write a paragraph about this topic so, she asked the students in-
group to give her some beginning sentences to introduce the topic. Students shared
their ideas and each group came up with a sentences and the teacher wrote them and
chose the best one. Then, they completed the paragraph together. The class was full of
energy and the students were full of enthusiasm. Through this way, the teacher
highlighted to the students how they could write a paragraph about different topics by
doing brainstorming of the topic, examples, writing and checking.
Then, the teacher brought a box full of small paper which included a topic and she
asked each students to choose one paper and read the topic and started to write about
the advantages and disadvantages of that topic. The teacher was going around the
class and providing support and help the students. Some students faced difficulties in

12. finding some advantages and disadvantages of their topic, so the teacher asked
students to help each other and share their knowledge. Some students were excellent
and they wrote a long paragraph with many different examples. At the end, the
teacher asked some students to read their paragraph, and she asked students to choose
the best one and she gave the girl a gift.
I liked the way that the teacher taught students to write by introducing the writing
techniques and gave the student an example and they wrote the paragraph together.
However, the different topics that the students chose could be not a good idea for
some students because the topic did not match their ability and even their
interesting.
At the end of this week, I finished all the requirements from me. I corrected all the
papers and books. I put students' marks. I finished the last unit in the book.