What the teacher does

1. SUPERVISING. While the class is happening you are not teaching anything, you are setting tasks and supervising work that will be mostly in languages you can't understand. I don't feel there is much point spending a long time with different language students working on cross-cultural projects in English as for none of them is it a goal to acquire cross-cultural knowledge. Their goal is to improve their language, therefore they must work with others who study their language or by themselves if they are the only one. 

2. TEACHING. The exception being the three students who are following the scheme of work we have written for native speakers without tutors. Therefore you are teaching three students and supervising 13 students. I sometimes feel as though there is not enough of me to do this effectively. While I'm teaching a lesson to a minority of the students, how can I be watching what the majority are doing? I think an answer would be to create an ISLE course with all the resources on for the native speakers without tutors. This would mean that they could work independently at their own pace on this without me needing to introduce it each time. This said I am glad I am having a more hands-on approach in teaching it this first time round so I can find out what works and what doesn't work.

2. ORGANISING. Outside of the class there is a lot of organisation to do. Firstly the lessons for the three native-speaker students have to be planned. Secondly dialogue with individual students and parents has to happen to ascertain the students' language needs, then liaison with tutors, booking rooms etc. It is really important that any GCSE level student has a tutor.

4. ASSESSING. When the students have completed the work, unless you happen to speak the language they are studying you can't assess it. You can see if they have done something on their blog, but you can't judge the quality of the work. Therefore you can't see any improvement, or give them advice on how to improve, which can be frustrating. Therefore you are relying on getting comments from adult native speakers to give you a clue as to what to say to the student to help them improve.