MDD Standard 5
- 1. MDD Standard 5 “Making Decisions and Analysis of the Results” After teaching a couple of lessons of the unit plan I designed for the very first time, I started noticing some aspects I needed to change within the unit. When someone starts teaching students in a classroom, the first step to engage these students into a lesson is to motivate them. I had never given too much thought to the idea of preparing fun activities for students to feel excited before I started the lesson; and after I showed my teacher the video of my first class at school, she helped me notice that students need to have a connexion with the lesson to be taught in order to feel more motivated and willing to learn. A second aspect I realized I had to modify in my planning was the time distribution, which can be really hard to manage, because you are almost never in control of what can happen, maybe someone needs assistance, a student makes you pause or stop a lesson because he/she starts talking, bothering a classmate, etc. As a teacher, and as a human being, you can never be in control of everything that happens inside a classroom. Motivating my students and controlling time inside the classroom were the first aspects I redesigned in my Unit plan. Also, I realised I had to analyse type of activities I wanted my students to work on, because I needed and wanted them to feel excited about the lesson. Consequently, I worked really hard on preparing motivating warm ups, activities and presentations; I avoided using the work book/ Textbook, since it was too monotonous and actually boring for students, and sometimes most of them did not even bring the book. Later on I started noticing a huge change in my students‟ attitude towards my lessons and the English learning process; they were finally excited about coming to an English Class, and the changes I made to the unit plan had the most successful of all results, because my students started wanting more activities and whenever they saw me at the school they would say „Miss, we cannot wait to have classes with you!‟, or „Miss, I love your classes!‟, and things like this make your entire days of work on that class something worthy.
- 2. When it comes to the results obtained by the students regarding the evaluation plan I created at the beginning of the unit, had the following results: 1. Diagnostic test at the beginning of the unit. This evaluation had the purpose of gathering information in terms of the students‟ proficiency to work with verb tenses and grammatical structures. The results were classified into Sobresaliente / Logrado / No Logrado (S= 25-30 points / L= 16-24 points / NL= 0-15 points / NA= No Aplica) Diagnostic Test Results S L 11% NL NA 4% 9% 76% *Note: 11% of the students did not answer the test. Of a total of 46 students of a class, only 13% of the group passed the test, while the 76% of the students did not. After analysing the results obtained by the students, I came up with modifications to the unit plan by adding two more lessons of work focused on verb tenses and grammatical structures.
- 3. 2. Formative evaluation: students write a letter of application to a space agency. Students had to follow a given pattern, which they worked with during previous classes in order to make them feel more familiar with the process of writing a letter of application. This formative evaluation had the following results: Letter of Application Results S L NL NA 11% 9% 35% 45% As it is shown above, 80% of the students accomplished the task, while only a 9% of them did not pass the evaluation. This can be due to the fact that students had previously exercised with this type of letter, so they were familiar with the evaluation.
- 4. 3. Summative Test: An evaluation of the students’ progress at the end of the unit. This was the final test of the unit, which was designed to evaluate the students by presenting them exercises related to verb conjugation/tenses, grammatical structures, listening activities with concepts/ vocabulary from the Unit. Summative Test Results S L NL NA 0% 24% 6% 70%