Critical Reflection on Teaching
Experience During Placement
Student name: Bui Tung Lam
ID: U3291171
Introduction
The teaching placement provided an invaluable opportunity to develop my pedagogical skills
and enrich my professional experience. Throughout the placement, I engaged in both
supervised and unsupervised teaching, receiving constructive feedback from my peers,
supervisor, and mentor teacher (but only the latter two will be considered for this reflection due
to time constraint and word limit). This reflection critically examines the key aspects of my
teaching experience, reflecting on the feedback received from my supervisor and mentor
teacher, highlighting key learning and teaching challenges, identifying areas of growth, and
proposing strategies for further professional development.
Reflection on Supervisor and Mentor Teacher Feedback
During my supervised teaching sessions, I received detailed and insightful feedback from both
my supervisor and mentor teacher. They highlighted several strengths in my teaching practice,
including careful lesson preparation, effective flow of activities, strong student-teacher
interaction, and sound classroom management. They also noted my flexibility and sensitivity to
students' affective needs, which contributed to a supportive learning environment.
However, they also identified several areas for improvement. One consistent point was the
need for a clearer lesson focus. Specifically, the alignment between lesson aims, objectives, and
tasks needed to be strengthened to ensure cohesive and goal-oriented lessons. Moreover,
regarding the lesson content, my mentor advised me to use more authentic materials that are
appropriately challenging for the students' proficiency levels, enhance communicative and real-
life knowledge, and to scaffold tasks more effectively.
Time management was another challenge noted in the feedback. From this, I learned the
importance of being selective with tasks and materials rather than attempting to cover
everything provided. This led me to adopt a more strategic approach in lesson planning,
prioritizing quality over quantity to meet lesson objectives more effectively. At the same time, I
was also reminded not to be greedy with my lesson by providing too much additional
information outside the syllabus to ensure the time limit.
Additionally, I was encouraged to reduce the amount of teacher talk and lengthy instruction
and instead promote more student-student interaction, particularly in communicative tasks.
This issue was directly addressed during the practicum by designing tasks that facilitated pair
and group work, as noted by my supervisor.
Regarding the feedback given during my teaching, as my supervisor stated during the micro-
teaching session, I should have provided more “formative and explicit” feedback to students.
This is something I will need to work on further.
Learning and Teaching Challenges
During the teaching experience, I have encountered certain difficulties that hinder the
effectiveness of my teaching. These involve technical issues, inadequate consideration of
students’ proficiency level, a shortage of authentic material usage, and interactions.
Initially, my teaching was negatively affected by challenges with digital tools. For the micro-
teaching session, I used both printed handouts and a PowerPoint presentation to support the
delivery of the lesson content. While the PowerPoint slides worked with only minor connection
issues, the handouts were incorrectly produced—most of the content was missing. This caused
a moment of panic, as the handouts were crucial for the lesson’s main tasks, including a gap-
filling exercise followed by a sequencing activity and a focus on cohesive devices. In response, I
improvised by adding the missing section to the PowerPoint slides and displaying them
onscreen. This workaround was time-consuming and impacted students’ ability to complete the
tasks effectively. Fortunately, this issue did not recur during my practicum and mentor-
supervised teaching sessions, as I was more thoroughly prepared, and institutions provided and
checked materials beforehand. Nonetheless, the incident revealed both a technological
weakness and a lapse in my preparation, which I could have avoided through a thorough pre-
lesson materials check. Moreover, there was usually a lack of digital tools in my teaching, such
as Quizlet. I intend to utilize them more in the future, specifically to make vocabulary learning
more exciting and enhance affective features.
Secondly, it is a challenge for me to include authentic materials into my teaching. While this is
not a significant problem during my micro-teaching and practicum, as these focus on General
English and thus providing more opportunities for suitable use of authentic materials, it is
proven to be rather difficult for my real-life professional teaching. As my expertise is IELTS
training, my lessons mostly focus on providing the test information and instructions, utilizing
mostly practice materials provided by professional education institutions, such as The Official
Cambridge Guide to IELTS or Cambridge IELTS 1-19 tests published by Cambridge University
Press. This is also required by my institution’s policy, so I do not have much authority to change
the lesson content (Hall, 2011). This could limit my students’ access to language outside the
classroom environment and hinder their communicative competencies (Gilmore, 2011).
The third issue that appeared in both my micro-teaching and practicum sessions was the
inappropriate consideration of the student’s language abilities. Particularly, several of the tasks
given, despite my initial belief, were unsuitably demanding for my students’ current levels,
which required them to allocate more time to the activities than I had expected. This
unnecessarily prolonged the lesson and detrimentally impacted on my lesson plan, as not all the
tasks involved were covered according to the teaching objectives. I believe that this is caused by
my misjudge of my student’s proficiency levels, therefore, I used materials that are too
challenging for my students, preventing them from receiving comprehensible input and limit
understanding (Hall, 2011). Recognizing this, I have since adjusted my planning, particularly
reducing the number and difficulty of the materials, raising the amount of time distributed to
each task, and provide additional scaffolding. This has helped ensure tasks remain appropriately
challenging while still achievable within the lesson context and also facilitated better time
management.
Designing tasks that matched the students’ proficiency levels was a notable challenge. Although
this is not a recurrent issue, I sometimes realize mid-lesson that the materials were too
advanced, such as during my micro-teaching session. Students became disengaged, and
comprehension suffered. Based on this experience and feedback, I began pre-teaching critical
vocabulary and adjusted the complexity of materials, ensuring tasks remain accessible. For
example, I adjusted the speed of video materials to better match the students’ abilities, while
allowing them to listen multiple times (Hall, 2011).
Finally, interactions were proven to be a recurrent issue during my teaching. Similar to my
mentor’s and supervisor’s comments, I acknowledge that I tend to facilitate more teacher-
student interactions in the classroom despite my effort to encourage student-student
interactions and employment of student-based tasks. In particular, there usually is an excessive
amount of teacher’s talks and instructions, as well as “teacher asking – students answering”
activities, stemming from my desire to ensure student’s understanding of the instructions and
content. This inadvertently occupies a large part of my lesson while limiting my students’
communicative opportunities, and go against the recommendations, particularly that made by
Hall (2011). Since the experiences, I have incorporated more collaborative activities such as
information gap tasks and group problem-solving exercises, which increased student autonomy
and peer engagement. This transition toward learner-centered teaching significantly enhanced
student participation and motivation.
Areas of Growth and Professional Development
Conclusion
