My teaching training: a semi serial reflection on the experience

My teaching training in Diaconia went very fast: one month, twice a week teaching Orientation English to Social Worker students. Total teaching hours: 20.
The group was very nice: talented, polite, ready for working in group and to use their English in all the situation that we faced during our path. It was indeed heterogeneous group: some of them just graduated from high school, some of them didn´t finish it. Some of them (even belong to religious group that doesn´t have easy access to TV or internet) could speak English rather well, others they had difficulties to follow what I was saying...It was a challenge. I took it 100 %. 

The tutor was huge help: for the first time since I started my teaching carrier I have got advises on how to improve my teaching...and it felt so good!
The tutor role is not simple and it requires a huge dose of patience and open mind: give to the teacher student an entire course is not easy especially if the student teacher doesn´t have so much experience.
My tutor was one of the special one: we could cooperate withouth problem and he gave me time after each lesson, giving me a feedback. 

The Orientation English is a mandatory course for those students that are studying to become Social workers and also work for the Parish.
My lessons were focused in theme such as: Finnish Welfare System, Family life, Adoption and Foreigner clients. We went through also practical things : dealing at the phone with no Finnish speaker, be able to make a conversation with the client in order to help him/her to face the difficulties in life. I found the group ready to face different situation and I provide my self the material based on the themes from the book and instruction given by the tutor. 

In 20 hours wasn´t possible to cover all the book themes so part of the studies, the students did on their own time. I decide to approach in really practical way: problem solving, role activities, support of technologies for the theoretical part  I also promote quite much the collaborative learning: working in a group and as a group it´s a basic thing for a social worker and the best way for learning. I was also careful about the timing and give enough time for the discussion where it seemed to involve students 100 % but in the meanwhile had always ready extra activities in case that discussion wouldn´t start. 

I tried to cover all the learning styles: I used platform like Prezi and Popplet to support the visualist and the kinestetic learners. My tutor said that my strenghts are my social skills: how immediately I made the contact with the students and build their trust. My weakness? my English pronunciation.......I would like also improve the area of assessment and the observation of the group. I felt (even though I observed them for 30 hours) that I would need to observe other thing in order to get my core plan ready...well I guess I have to trust my memory. Lucky for me I eat fish twice a week ;) 

The difficult part for me was to evaluate their final test and give them a fair assessment: my tutor mentioned couple times that we were working in a University so the level of their English has to be proper for the studies curriculum. For the test please  look here: Test for Social Workers

The experience itself was great and exhausting and that´s why I wasn´t able to write anything until now. I need to breathe especially when at the evening I had long trips to go to work, a 3 years old to take care and housework to do it. A huge help came from my parents that spent 2 months in here without knowing English or Finnish, in the dark and cold December and January....to help me enjoying fully this experience. I would never thank them enough.