June+13,+2011

REFLECTIONS

Ying Li

This morning Dr. Mimi asked us to step back and review what we have learned last week. At the beginning I thought this is only a summery. Dr. Mimi let me understand this is a method of teaching- make the students thinking. I deeply remember “Thinking is learning, no thinking, no learning”. Meanwhile she gave us an interesting foreign language lesson; help us to understand teaching can be undertaken by students too.

Shelley Xiao Ms Chou told us that Dr. Mimi was the probably the best immersion expert in the world. I could see it from today’s lecture. Indeed, she really demonstrated what immersion effortlessly but very powerful! I didn’t need to try but got what she was trying teaching us. I wish that we could have some sort of handout with some of key points, so we will be able to reflect our mind down the road. The lightest ink, exceed (is better than) the strongest memory (最淡墨水胜过最强的记忆). We have learned so much from just a week which is GREAT. I hope my memory can retain most of what we have learned.

By the way, I am so glad that we were able to work with teachers who will be teaching on the same day. Our group had a very good time and we all learned from each other. I am looking forward tomorrow’s class.

Han Wei Dr. Mimi leads us review what we have learned last week in individual brainstorming, groups discussion and table presentation to share and learn from each other. We learn some strategies on how to make the unknown language words understandable to the students in the immersion class. Most important of all, I know the concept that thinking is learning and no thinking is no learning. In the afternoon, we meet in the Day group and letter group to discuss our lesson plans for the coming week.

Jade Jiang Clayton I feel lucky that GVA invited Dr. Mimi to be a guest speaker. I can tell she is excellent in design lessen plan and classroom management. I am looking forward to learning more from her in this week. She was joking around about how many years of her teaching experience, and said " I started to teach before the electricity was invented."

Fanghong Yu I have deeper understanding about "I do, we do, you do". Our instructor said it should be like this. "I do, we do, we do, we do.....you do". The point is we need take more time to guide our students until the students feel confident to do it by themselves. In the afternoon, we talked about the lesson plan for Friday. We agree to wrap up this unit with a summative testboth written and oral.

//Zhang Xiaohong// //From Mimi, I learned that thinking is learning. When there is no thinking, there is no learning. The students do the work of thinking. Teachers' work is to make students think. This is very important for me since I have been educated in a way that emphasized memorization a lot. Maybe right after the exam students tend to forget what they have learned through memorization. But they will retain what they have learned through th//inking. In the afternoon we have a specific teaching plan through group discussion.

Gu Xitao This morning I benefited a lot from Dr Mimi. The group discussion about what we have learned last week helped me to connect what we have learned with how to apply that into our teaching next week. The Spanish demo class is very impressive. I learned some simple Spanish words. Most important of all, I learned that teacher may not necessarily be the only person teaching in class. Teaching can be undertaken by students too.

Tracy Peng We reviewed systematically the great ideas we learned from Ms. Chau by group work and presentation. Dr. Mimi showed us how to teach a new language to students at novice level. What I have learned is that you must design sequences of activities to get students involved, letting them thinking, speaking and understanding. Another important thing is how to plan the lesson. This afternoon we met in groups and discussed our teaching plan in specific details. We did wonderful brain-storming work!

I-Chi Wang I got a chance to review the theories from group sharing this morning. It helped me to refresh all the teaching strategies that I have learned before. Dr. Mimi's demostration on how to teach novice level students to speak Spanish also helped me to use the activities to aid learners to remember the vocabulary. Letting students teach each other is a great idea for them to interact. From the afternoon group gathering, we got more great ideas to teach different level students.

Jubie Ahn After the intense course learned from Ms Chau last week, it's time for me to digest all the learning and put in practice. From Dr. Mimi's demonstration, I now really believe Immersion teaching/learning works. She emphasizes the importance of thinking before doing, using simple words of target language, repeatly, consistently combined with activities, total body response ... to get the engagement and attention from the students. It works because at least I can understand and talk few spanish words learned from this morning.

Yinsan Isabel Hsu I appreciated how Dr. Met presented the class today. She had demostarted classrooom managemnet, grouping and teaching strategies thru her presentation. In addition, she provided rationales for all of the things she went over; so we can understand. Dr. Met gave me a way to reflect my learning from last week and a chance to organize/filter those big ideas.

Cao Yongxin We start the new week training today. With the short demo which we do not know at the very beginning ,Dr. Mimi give us a specific practice on how to use different way to present the new language material. Especially, the importance of input by meaningful and interesting way is so necessary. And during the whole Spanish teaching she give us, she does not say a single English words, which make me have such thought, for immerson program, at the very beginning stage, how much you teach is not important, but using the target language for 100% is so important. Also, student maybe will get lost in some place, but they will make a great improvement after the difficult period at the very beginning stage.

Chunyan Wang: One great teacher after another, today we have another great teacher -Ms. Mimi. she showed us how to learn your students first by using all the diffrent activities,then teach and refresh what we have learned. she also demoed us how to teach a target languge in immersion way,that was really fun, she didn't say a English word at all, even I didn't know any spanish ,I still got the meaning what she was trying to let us do.

Belinda Liu--Today, we got Dr. Lao to teach us Chinese Literacy. We discussed a lot of problems that we concerned in our chinese class. Dr. Lao also showed us how to teach Chinese characters in the fastest and easiest way. She read some great chinese books to us and taught us how to teach Chinese literacy through reading. We tried to write lesson plans for the books we read, but we didn't get enough time. We will do more practice tomorrow.

Mo Geng Following Dr. Mimi directions, we worked in group to brainstorm and review the big ideas, which we learned from Ms. Chau during last week. Each group’s charts made the concepts of different teaching theories and strategies more clearly. I remember that during the class, Dr. Mimi said, //“////Thinking is learning”, I believe this// is a good motto for a teacher //.// I also interested in Dr. Mimi’s strategy, when we teach students, we should follow, “I do, we do, we do, we do…..you do", to help students to remember.

Sherry Chao Today is the 1st day of the 2nd week of training. Dr. Met presented the class. She presented how to teach foreign languages in Spanish. i like the way she used the TPR and effective repetition. She kept repeating the words while she was grouping us. We had very good discussion on planning the lesson plan for the next week.

Ning Wei We started today with a group activity- summarize what we have learned from last week. It was a good review for me to go through with my peers on all of the theories. Then, Dr. Met did a demo lesson on shoes in Spanish. It was very interesting and effective teaching and I learned a lot of strategies on classroom management and immersion teaching. The meeting with my own group in the afternoon was productive as well.

Shuo Chen We had a review of the knowledge that we learned last week. That's a very necessary step to create our own knowledge structure, and I also learned something from other team's idea. Ms. Mimi used picture demo, meaningful repartition, and key words repetition to teach us Spanish. That is a good example of immersion language class for us.

Shan Lou I don’t know why. I enjoy Mrs. Chou’s class better than today’s class. Maybe I am used to hear Chinese than English. But I did learn a lot from Dr. Mimi too. She is totally American style’s teacher. She loves to use “students do” better than “teacher does” or “we do”. She gives us a lot of time to work on group discussion. By this way, we can learn more by using less time on our class. Of course, we could get a lot of great ideas from group discussion. Looking forward to move on to tomorrow’s class.

Ruihong Wu I liked the ways Dr. MiMi let us to outline all lessons what we learned from our instructor last week. That was really helpful to understant teaching theories much better. After she presented the immesion language lesson for us using only spanish, I believed it would be useful to use with my students because I just learned some new spanish vocabulary by myself. I felt more confident to accept the challenge to teach the novice learner.

Yewei jiang As somebody said, Dr.Mimi is a typic American teacher. I think this is much valuable for us since we are Chinese teacher, and we are teaching in America! Dr.Mimi showed her proficiency and "in the highest flight" in the immersion teaching today, I hope I can learn more from her in the coming days!

Louisa Yu Today Dr. Mimi showed us how to teach in US, She is a typic American teacher, and professor in immersion program. We have learned lots from her. Looking forward to move on to tomorrow's class.

Mo Geng At beginning of today class, Dr. Mimi gave us a very useful material, “From Standards to Lesson Plans”, which can effectively help us to complete us lesson plan. We worked in group to define, clarify, and summarized “backward design, context of lesson within unit, research-based instructional strategies, assessment, student centered instruction, brain-compatible instruction, differentiation, motivation, scaffolding, developmentally appropriate practices, and closure”.These main points are very essential elements to build my lesson plan.