My First Teaching Experience

  I got back in my memory an incident that occurred a year ago while I was teaching my 3rd graders how to write a  personal narrative paragraph. Back then, I supplied my students with all the words, phrases, idioms, transitions, topics, and concluding sentences they needed to write a “good” personal narrative paragraph.  They practiced a lot how to write a personal narrative paragraph step by step as if it was just a jigsaw puzzle that they have to join together using a specific technique or method. After one whole month of practice, many students excelled in the assessment of writing a personal narrative paragraph. However, I was shocked that many others got low grades and didn’t even improve after all this practice. I believe that to guarantee my students’ success in writing a good piece of writing, I should implement those keys into my teaching cycle. First, assessment should be a student-involved one in a way that makes them responsible for the learning process. Second, I will assess them during the learning process and not after so they would be able to figure out their mistakes and avoid them in the future. Third, I will archive every piece of their writing during practice time for them to have a clear vision of the learning target. Only then, students will grasp the opportunity to compare and realize where they are from where they are supposed to be and every time the distance becomes shorter I will hint at that. Fourth, I will strive to build life-long learners. In other means, students will be able to evaluate their writing and fix it and be able to make dependable judgments. Finally, I won’t only stress giving them handouts of the material and sort their writings as “good” or “bad” ones rather I will take into consideration to communicate effectively about their achievements using an informative descriptive language. Most importantly, when implementing all of the above in my classroom, I will be able to build students' confidence in their abilities.