Last Words

It truly feels like "only yesterday" that I been accepted in the TESOL program at GSE.. As I reflect on the past two years been here in Philadelphia, I am filled with both pride and excitement.

The faculty here was very helpful, knowledgeable, and care about success of the students. One of the reasons I chose UPENN is because of the warmth and compassion from the staff. When I first came here for a tour they were very welcoming and that made me want to come here. my program (TESOL) was very fast paced and requires continuous hard work and dedication to achieving my goals. It is quite an exciting experience and there are opportunities to get involved actively in the GSE.

One of the nice things about UPENN is its small-community feeling. Almost everyone I have met at UPENN is pleasant and friendly. It is easy to strike up a conversation with anyone, from the Assistant Dean to the cleaning staff. Whenever I have a problem, I can usually find someone who will do their best to help me. In addition, the smaller class size has given me the opportunity to know many of my classmates fairly well. Most of the GSE faculty are knowledgeable and very approachable. Believe it or not, the professors are actually concerned about their students' well-being and understanding of the material. It is encouraging to know that I can go to them with any questions. Another positive feature of UPENN and the GSE is how receptive they are to student feedback. Student opinions are taken into account when making improvements for the school.. The GSE programs' curriculum were very dynamic because the faculty considers comments and concerns from current students when planning for future classes.! The knowledgeable, experienced and super friendly professors / staff really do make this school an ideal environment to pursue your education and dreams."

I'm planning to leave this May to my country "Jordan" and I hope to get a position in one the universities there to teach English language to undergraduate students.

Finally here are some of advices for incoming students which I found useful during my two-year program:

1. Always plan ahead in your classes so you can get more free time for fun.

2. Utilize the excellent faculty here: try to have close relationships with professors, get to know them, and don’t be afraid to ask for help

3. The more time you spend with the age group you plan on teaching will better equip you to relate to them on their own level and increase your understanding of their learning processes, so I highly recommend courses that have a fieldwork requirement.

4. Network and get to know others in your field. Get to know your faculty; they will help you become a professional.

5. Get used to presenting your work to others, its nice to have feedback form others.

6. Teaching should not be looked at as a job. It should be preserved as a way of life, meaning that once you make the choice to be a teacher you have also made the choice to become a life-long learner.

7. Find ways to get involved on campus. This experience will help you a lot in the long run.

Continue … Material Development in Team Teaching Approach

Choosing appropriate materials is one of the teachers' challenges in classes that have students with variety of cultural, ethnic, and proficiency background (Heath, 1982). Therefore, teachers need expertise to select, adopt, and/or develop study materials that are appropriate to their student’s academic and social needs. For those reasons, the material development in language’s classes seeks to address two major objectives regarding students' needs and expectations: firstly, to help students become more skillful in reading, writing, and presentation skills; and secondly, to create an authentic material for language acquisition in the classroom and thus to encourage students to express their own ideas, feelings, attitudes, and needs.

In team teaching approach, the material development process was flexible and effective through team work. Therefore, the decision of adopting authentic materials for the class was taken by the team using the online discussion forum and followed by a meeting in which we negotiate the effectiveness and appropriateness of those materials. According to Robinson and Selman (1996), "It is the teacher's responsibility to find ways of integrating communicative purposes into the task we invite students to perform" (p. 56). Therefore, a final decision would be made on what changes should be made to make sure the activities and materials meet students' needs, students' proficiency level, communicative approach features, and the course goals as well.

Furthermore, we adopted materials from different sources, such as the internet, stories collection books, and ESL books. This diversity of sources allowed for more flexibility in adapting appropriate authentic materials and to provide students with adequate content that contributed on enhancing their second language acquisition. In addition, most adopted stories were based on the students cultural and ethnicity background. For example, we adopted folktales, true hero, ghost, news, humorous stories form Korea, Japan, and China.

Form sociolinguistics prospective, adopting materials will also have to take into account the social context in which the content and the language will be used in, as well as to enable students use them outside the classroom for the sake of effective language interaction (Heath, 1982). In order to achieve this adaptivity, appropriate narration techniques were introduced by the team to the class such as "dramatic performance of folktales talk" where students learned how to tell their stories using different and exaggerated character voices, using body language, and maintain eye contact with the audience. Hence, the knowledge that the learners acquired through adopting those types of materials contributed in making students involved in their social context. For example, one of the students explained that he used those techniques and stories to open a conversation with native speakers in which collectively helped him to use the language effectively outside the classroom.

From the perspective of second language acquisition, educators should provide their students with a meaningful and comprehensible input, whether the content is a written or spoken one (Pica, 2002). Therefore, we made sure that the tasks we adopted in the course were more comprehensible to students at their level of language proficiency. For example, we started with easy tasks/activities at the beginning of the course and ended with students' project in which they had to write two short stories and perform them dramatically in the class.

Since this class based on story telling features, we focused on certain grammatical structures such as verb tenses used to narrate (the simple past). In addition, we focused on adjectives as to expand and increase students’ sophistication of vocabulary for description. Therefore, we narrowed our focus after assessing students' grammatical proficiency and what grammatical features need more attention. For example, we asked students during the first week to write a short story about their experience when they arrived to Philadelphia. We realized that simple past, adjectives and articles were among the difficult grammatical features that students need more focus on. The next step was to adopt activities and materials that illustrate those features in a communicative approach. For example, we designed an activity for the past tense by asking students to write a short story about their heroes or anyone who inspired them, and then they were asked to share their stories with partners and to focus on the past tense usage by giving peer-feedback.

TEAM TEACHING

I've already discussed briefly my service project in my previous post regrading team teaching approach, and in this post i will further discuss this approach. The team teaching approach we adopted involves a group of teachers who work in a circular process that includes: setting the course goals, designing the syllables, preparing lesson plans, teaching students, and eventually evaluating the results. Besides all these standard procedures in teachers' planning process, we also designed and developed the materials as part of the team teaching process. This process required structured planning, willingness to make changes on teaching methods and styles, skilled classroom management, and creativity to achieve the goals stated above.

The process was difficult to manage in the early weeks of the course; however, we managed to handle it with team spirit and using efficient management plan. Consequently, the plan includes meeting once a week on Monday to discuss lesson plans and evaluate the previous one. Furthermore, means of communication were various to help us keep other team members updated, so we used blackboard website to sent lesson plans and comments as well as reflections on our teaching.

Advantaged and Disadvantaged of Team Teaching Approach

Team teaching has several advantages for both team members and the students as well. For instance, this approach helped us to manage connecting theories to real practice beginning with weekly lesson plans and ending with evaluating teachers' input and students' output as well. Bair and Woodward (1964) highlight the importance of team teaching approach regarding the final product of the team's planning process, and that the product is superior to those developed by a single teacher. I found this true regarding my team's final decision of how and what should be adopted during our weekly meetings. We usually had more than one approach to teach the same topic, but eventually we had to decide which one the most efficient to the class. Therefore, team teaching had a significant role regarding improving the quality of teaching and connecting theory to practice which was our main goal of adopting this experience in the first place. In addition, we focused on our strengths and adopted other members' strengths as well through observation and peer-feedback. At the same time, our weaknesses were discussed thoroughly with team members to figure out various team members' skills which eventually lead to complement each other in the class.

From the perspective of sociolinguistics, unsuccessful communication between teachers and culturally different students could lead to lack of educational success, thus teachers should have at least the minimum knowledge of their students culture background (Bernstein, 1972; Cummins, Brown, & Sayers, 2007). In order to avoid this miscommunication, my team worked together to maximize the communication efficiency in the classroom by having teachers from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds especially that some of them share the same cultural background with several students in the class. As a result, knowing something about students' language and culture background was helpful in defining their learning attitudes, challenges and expectations. For example, my Korean team members told me that Korean students view teacher as a person who leads the class and speaks most. Therefore, we agreed that to encourage more students participation, students should be taught the role of teachers as facilitators or helper and that they are responsible for constructing their knowledge.

In addition, working with a team contributed in spreading responsibilities and workload especially when there is no textbook provided in the course, and the team had to design the course materials. My team consisted of three teachers who took different roles through the course based on the language skill we want to teach (speaking, listening, reading, or writing), and members' strengths and weaknesses. For instance, I was in charge of listening and reading activities in most of the classes since they were my strengths.

One of the significant advantages for adopting this approach is the production of lower teachers-students ratio. We successfully managed to make every member of the team involved in class activities since we ran separate activities and gave each member a role through circulating and interacting with students. According to SLA researchers, teachers are advised to circulate and offer constructive feedback to learners during their pairs or small group activities in which eventually would enhance students' language acquisition (Omaggio-Hadley, 2001). Thus, having more than one teacher circulating in the class will collectively lead to enhance and improve students' acquisition. For example, during one speaking activity I assigned each team members with one group of students to provide them with the feedback needed and to help students achieve the goal of the activity as well.

On the other hand, team teaching approach was very challenging and demanding for the team members. The pressure from team members during the class was among the challenges we had to deal with. For example, every class we had at least three observers who were taking notes and comments regarding teaching styles, classroom management, and how successful the team member deliver his/her message to the target student.

In addition, team teaching made more demands regarding the time and energy from team members. For example, I spent more than three hours a week just for planning my part of the class (approximately 27-30 minutes of class time), and we had to post our lesson plan on the blackboard three days in advance to have feedback from teams members. The final step was to arrange agreeable meeting times for planning and evaluation the lesson plan before we adopt it for the class.

MY SERVICE PROJECT

My service project was to create and teach a ten-week course called "Building Better English Through Storytelling" with a team of teachers. This voluntary fieldwork teaching mainly aimed to connect teachers with the teaching environment and to offer students with efficient language exposure through modern theories being taught at the Graduate School of Education. Therefore, the course objectives were to help students become more confident in reading, writing, and presentation skills. In addition, class activities included reading and telling stories, folk tales, and legends from different countries; writing and revising stories; and building vocabulary. As a result, students improved pronunciation, listening comprehension, and vocabulary throughout the course.

The teaching team consists of five teachers (1 United States of America, 3 South Korea, 1 Jordan). The team taught one ten-week session (32 hours) of "Building Better English through Storytelling" course from October to December 2007 at a language center on one of the local universities in Philadelphia. The class met twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays for about one hour and twenty minutes each. Those classes are afternoon classes open to all non-native English speakers which focus on pronunciation, listening comprehension, and vocabulary. Student's proficiency levels were intermediate and upper-intermediate level and we had two students who were more advanced than the others (1 Japan, 1 Norway). Students came from different ethnic backgrounds representing Japan 1, Norway 1, Korea 5, china 1, Taiwan 2, Thailand 2.

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The two themes I have selected for this service project are based on my experience of team teaching at the Language Center: curriculum design and time management in the classroom.

The reason behind choosing team teaching approach as an overarching theme is that it involves a group of teachers from different cultural backgrounds working regularly, cooperatively, and purposefully to help students learn the language effectively and to gain experience from each others as well. In addition, the team members together set goals for the course, design the syllabus, prepare individual lesson plans, teach students, and evaluate the results. I chose the curriculum design process as my first sub-theme because it was totally new for me and my team members as well. Consequently, we found that designing a curriculum needed more hard work than expected. However, beginning with assessing students' needs and ending with adopting and teaching authentic materials that enhance language acquisition was a unique experience that every graduate student should look for. The purpose of choosing time management as the second sub-theme is that it is consider one of the challenges that are associated with teaching and that teachers have to deal with. Besides that, the time issue could even be more difficult when we team teach rather than having our own class.

Both the knowledge I gained from different courses in the Graduate School of Education, observation class, and my previous experience in teaching English language lead to a better understanding of those issues in language classroom, and what are the practical ways/methods/procedures to deal with them effectively.

Both themes I already introduced above - the curriculum design and time management- are interrelated and have a major impact on the success of teaming teachings approach. As a matter of fact, team teaching was not as straightforward as we had at first imagined. Clearly, some aspects of team teaching could leave little opportunity for teachers' to teach the language for the entire class time, but then the result depends rather more upon how the teachers as a team handle the process, and upon how the students react toward this new approach for them. Moreover, I heavily focused on items which caused concerns for the team which includes curriculum design, different teaching styles and classroom management difficulties that are part of the ongoing routines of running a classroom.

But despite the problems and difficulties we saw considerable values in it, if only because it is likely improve our teaching effectiveness and encouraged us to work harder to enhance our strengths, overcome our weaknesses, and invest more effort in knowing how to connect theory to practice. In addition, this interesting experience gave us the chance to discuss the role of each teacher in the classroom, what type of teaming structure will work for the class, design a full course, Share beliefs, and discuss teaching styles as well.

Finally, I believe that this experience provided me with the necessary tools for teaching English language professionally in my country, where we in deep need for such experiences and modern approaches in language classrooms.

SKYDIVING

Besides the horse riding, I always was a fan of skydiving sport and still.For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to try this great sport. There seemed to me a great challenge throwing oneself out of a an aircraft and heading marvelously towards the hard, and merciless ground.

I still remember my first jump when I emptied my pockets of anything that could fall to earth and then went through the basic routine associated with such a sport. It was in the morning when I saw my aircraft: a big, green, "C -130" aircraft. We clambered in, sat on the floor and within seconds we were prepared for take-off. Through the small window I could see the horizon dropping away. The roads disappeared into pencil lines and the cars become like ants.

My skydive instructor provide us with some instructions before the jump, and since it was my first one I listened as if he were telling me how to earn a million dollar!!

When the airplane back door opened, I stared straight down, and I felt the air pushing me outside the plane. and suddenly when the green light went on, my instructor gave me the order "jump" and then found myself falling loudly and violently towards landing area.

The view was truly magnificent and I was able to turn by moving my arms and legs. Eventually, after what seemed just a few seconds but was actually about a minute, the parachute opened with a smack and was banking to the left and the right using two main handles.

I had completed a full course in skydiving with about 15 jumps from over 16,500 feet.

Grad School

This is a brief journal talking about my experience in picking my Grad school. I started looking into grad school on the tail end of my second year in teaching English language. I already knew which country I wanted to go, so the only questions I had were "which program, " and "where?" I started going to the websites of every program I was remotely interested in, applied for additional reading material, and I tried talking to everyone who had any affiliation to my chosen major. Professors, professionals, advisors, and to the schools themselves. Eventually, I narrowed down my choices in schools from approximately 200 to 12.

Probably the best place to start, once you decide on the major/program that you're interested in pursuing, is brainstorming a list of questions. I'm not sure what considerations matter most to you, but just for the sake of example here, here are the type of questions I was asking myself when I was looking into Grad school: 1) Do I want just an MA, or a Ph.D afterwards? (Some programs are better suited for different academic/career ambitions) 2) What type of job placement success does this program have? 3) Does the program offer financial aid? (e.g. grants, loans, teaching/research assistantship, etc.) 4) Are there faculty on this program that have research interests similar to my own?

To make a long story short, just be honest in what you want, and ask as many questions (to as many people) as possible. When you start getting a lot of overlap in the answers you're receiving, you can develop a consensus that makes the decision-making part a little easier. This is my story in picking my beloved GSE at the University of Pennsylvania.

Study Tips

One of the best things I have learned in the GSE is not to study for hours and hours straight. You should study for about 50 minutes, and take a 10 minute break. I used to listen to books on tape for that 10 minutes to take my mind away from what I was learning. You have a learning curve, you usually retain the most from the first 10 and the last 10 minutes of studying.

One of my colleagues used to have the same problem of studying for hours and getting sleepy by hour number 3. The thing that worked for him is taking breaks. Like a 30 minute break every 2 hours! he either had to get out of the room he was in or let his mind relax. i think what you DON'T want to do is over do the Coffee/Energy Drinks/Soda.....I think the caffeine eventually wears off and it's only a temporary relief. I know in college life it is hard to manage any free time you have let alone manage how you are going to study, but I ALWAY found time to study AFTER a nap. I had to have naps in order to study....

An important tip is that in stead of cramming it in the week before or during the finals, you should have set some time before that to study. What I do in College is that I began studying about 2-3 weeks before the finals. During this time, I would compile a list of things that I have studied (not to mention some practice problems, whatever). By the time you finish studying, you will have an outline of things that you have studied. Use this outline to jolt your mind before the finals. Read each section of the outline, and see if you can remember what the important things are. If you can, then move to the next line in the outline. Go through the entire outline until you feel comfortable. The outline will allow you to go back to certain things if you forgot something.