LO 1 Identifying own strengths and develop areas for personal growth

Chinese Chat has always been one of my favourite activities – I joined in middle school, and have been helping younger kids with their Chinese since then. As I have spent my early years in China, my Chinese skill is sufficient for providing extracurricular help to second language learners, I love the language, and the challenge of teaching is strangely addicting – I think these are the reasons why I signed up for Chinese Chat year after year.

Ever since I joined the activity, I knew that I’m not a natural born teacher – mentees get bored, they get distracted, they get nothing done, and they often need motivation – much like myself and my classmates on a bad day, actually. However, I also realised that with constant and persistence, improvement is actually possible – last year, when my mentee did well on a test, I was so unreasonably and euphorically happy. I hope my new mentee and I will be able to achieve that this year.

One of the key things I need to focus on is organisation. Although I have no problem organising myself, I sometimes feel unjustified in telling other people to do things, and sometimes the amount of choices I give mentees can be distracting, (what do you want to do today? flashcards? pictionary? how much time do you need before I test your writing?) and they may learn better if I made the minor decisions for them. However, I think I should continue letting them decide on the new words to learn, since they will pick words that they’ll actually use, as opposed to me teaching them words that aren’t relevant to their lives. If I was a mentee, I would also expect to be told what to do – since the mentor has a ‘toolbox’ of games and activities, it would make the most sense for them to plan the lesson. Another thing I need to work on is to stop making irrelevant jokes and going off tangent – these are the result of my attempts on using humor to engage mentees. However, they seem to cut into the flow of the lesson. I think learning happens best by a continuous grappling of ideas. Gaps in the lesson plan are also quite dangerous – I’ve sat in classes that ran wild when the teacher was looking for her resources – I’ll make sure this never happens to me by writing a lesson plan. (link to my lesson planning document) I didn’t have much of a lesson plan on the first session, as I was trying to get to know the mentee’s abilities. (comprehension seems fine, vocab range could be greater, writing could be improved) Next session, I should try to find out more about the expectations of his course, so I’ll know what (ie sentences, writing, phrases) to drill him on.

I feel that the Chinese Chat has helped me become more skilful in teaching, and I think these skills will continued to be honed throughout the next two years.