Instantiation of my Presentation

My main goal for the presentation that I gave last Monday was to bring the twelve new abstract principles that we read in the book into a more concrete light. In other words, I wanted the class to be able to see how each one of these principles could be used in our future classrooms. Unfortunately I don't think I accomplished this goal.

I tried to get everyone involved at the beginning by having a few people say where they will be teaching and I think that that was a good start. After all who doesn't like to talk about the new places they will be experiencing or their home country? One thing I could have done differently though, to make this short activity go even further, would've been to have a couple people explain how they perceive the problems that they may encounter in a new culture or the ones that they know they will have to deal with in their native culture. This might've gotten the class to think more about teaching in an actual classroom and then we could've discussed a couple principles (not all 12) that we see as critical in solving some of the challenges that we will be facing in the near future as teachers.

But I did not think of this until afterwards and the result of my presentation was that a good portion of our class either tuned out or were uninterested. I know that if I was listening to myself during this presentation that I would've been unengaged also, probably because I had already read the bland text before class. But my biggest, and maybe most simple, realization about the presentation was that I didn't accommodate the variety of learning styles that we have in our classroom (Visual, Kinesthetic, and auditory). I now realize that my discussion was mainly auditory and that (according to principle 5: Strategic Investment/the learner's methods of learning) this wasn't a good strategy to get the class engaged while reinforcing the previously read material. Instead I should have had some elements from the other two principles integrated into the presentation. After class I thought "well duh", but I think that it is simple and practical ideas like this that many of us overlook which may be the most helpful when we begin teaching in an actual ESL classroom.