Portfolio Intro

Hello! Yes, Hello. My name is Aedan. Yes, Aedan. I am a 24 year old teacher and writer from Seattle. Or, I guess, I will be a teacher and writer at some point– I don't really have those credentials yet. Which is fine I guess if I'm 24. Anyways, here I am in Spain. The reason I came to Spain is because my wife has family that live in Madrid and she was raised as a Spanish-American person in a bilingual household. So we are spending time with her family here that she's been separated from her whole life, and also we're here so I can improve my Spanish language skills through immersion, which is kind of working. Anyways I am also of course here to teach English as an Auxiliar de Conversacion, which is also kind of working. Just kidding it's great. Anyways I decided to do the program because I want to become a teacher, like I guess I already said, and sure enough this program is proving to be great experience for me. I'm thinking of this year as a sort of teacher-training year for me, in the USA it is difficult to get hands on classroom teaching experience without first going through the certification process, so I am very grateful for the unique opportunity. My plan is to become a secondary social studies and/or language arts teacher back home and luckily I have gotten very relevant experience at the school I am placed at.

The school I was placed at is called IES Antonio Gala in Móstoles, Madrid. It is a secondary school with bilingual and bachillerato programs, and the age range is 12-18+. Like many Auxiliares, I am all over the school. I have variously been placed with 11 different teachers (I think I counted right), and am teaching every single grade level in English classes whose ability levels range from very low to bilingual bachillerato. I am also teaching in bilingual non-English classes– Music, History/Geography, and previously PE. Being thrown into various subjects, ages, and abilities with zero proper teaching experience and zero paid prep-time is difficult and requires very healthy workplace boundaries. It seems like the Aux Madrid program provides little to no accountability for schools' use and treatment of Auxiliares as I have heard a very, very wide range of experiences from people in the program. Luckily, by chance I was placed at a school with a great Coordinator and teachers that generally have realistic and fair expectations, so I have been having a great experience in spite of the challenges. Because I want to become a teacher, and am viewing this experience as a sort of student-teaching year, I have been using the classrooms to test-drive different methodological teaching strategies and even practice lesson planning and curriculum building. This portfolio represents a range of classroom activities that I have facilitated, each highlighting a unique curriculum or teaching strategy that I have been practicing as I look toward having my own classroom back in the U.S. in the near future. Enjoy!

Hanukkah Presentation!

 Level: Multiple

I was asked by many teachers to do a holiday season presentation, and because my wife and I are Jewish, I decided to focus the entire presentation on Hanukkah. As I anticipated, because of the hundreds of years of very low Jewish presence and visibility in Spain following the edict of expulsion in 1492, most students had never heard of Hanukkah and were unfamiliar with basic ideas about Judaism in general. Because of this, my presentation started with a brief overview of the history of the Jewish community in the United States and an introduction to basic Jewish vocab, like "Hebrew," "Torah," "Rabbi," and "Synagogue." After the overview, I explained what Hanukkah is holistically, covering the story, the traditions, the food, and the activities. I employed several videos throughout. In general, I was very impressed by the students' level of respect and engagement with the presentation! Because I was teaching the same topic to a variety of English levels, ranging from very low to bilingual, I had to constantly adjust the curriculum, change my focus dramatically from class to class (e.g. focusing mostly on basic vocab in lower level classes vs. having complex discussions about the Jewish lunar calendar in others.) This kept me on my toes and was great practice.

Here's the link: Happy Hanukkah!

Noise Pollution Presentation

 Level: 2E de la eso, Music

I work with several teachers for bilingual subjects outside of English and one of them is music. I am a musician, so it is pretty fun to get an opportunity to teach what I know and to compare music instruction here in Madrid to that of the U.S.A. One of the music teachers asked me to prepare a little lesson on noise pollution one day, so I made a short powerpoint and presented it. Noise pollution happens to be a personal topic to me, as the neighborhood I live in back in Seattle is on a hill directly under the flight path for air traffic from SeaTac airport and has very high noise pollution. Because the neighborhood, called Beacon Hill, is a working class neighborhood filled primarily with Black Americans and Asian and Latino immigrants, there is a growing movement in the neighborhood to fight against the noise pollution as a racial and economic justice issue. The students in the music class are basically bilingual, with a very high English level, so I decided to include the story of my home neighborhood in my presentation and try to lead a discussion on how Noise pollution is related to institutional racism and classism. This part of my presentation only sort of worked, and it was obvious that most of the students had never encountered any of the background ideas that would have made this conversation possible (they didn't have much of a grasp if any on the concept of "racism" in general.) That was my fault, as I took for granted certain things and presented them with a problem without giving them the tools they would have needed to understand it. Over all though, the presentation went pretty well, and I learned a lot from teaching it.

Here's the link: Noise Pollution Presentation

Charades for Practicing Simple Past

 Level: 3B de la eso

I have had a couple sections of 3 de la eso students that did not have a teacher for the first 3 months of school because of the COVID related teacher shortage in Madrid. The students' English level is very low, and because my Spanish is also pretty low it was very difficult to plan activities to do with them. However, I did figure out a few activities that were pretty successful. Here's an example of one that really worked: a game of charades. The activity started with each student instructed to write a list of several things they did last summer, using the simple past (because that is what we had been focusing on.) Because it's hard for them to think up English verbs on the spot and they tend to need prompting, I provided them a big list of sample verbs to use. After they had written the list, they took turns acting out an item on their list in front of the whole class without using words. If another student could guess the action (using the simple past i.e. "you drove a car.") that student would get a point. I kept score on the chalkboard. At first it was difficult to get students to volunteer, but once I offered them a point for volunteering as well as for guessing correctly, they became more bold. In both classes I did the activity with, by the end pretty much everyone was having fun, and some of the students actually got pretty competitive about the points!

Here's the link: Simple past charades

College Admissions Debate

 Level: Primero Bachillerato, Bilingual section

For my bilingual Bachillerato classes, the English level is so high that the teachers and I are basically free to lesson plan as we would teaching a high school English language arts class in the United States. One of the activities we have done is organize a "debate": present the class with two options and have them come up with arguments in support of and against each, then deciding which they prefer. This is a great way to encourage critical thinking skills, and to prepare them to engage in high level abstract discussion in the English language. The topic I chose for the class was college admissions in the U.S. vs. in Spain. First I wrote notes on each on a white board to provide a visual aid. The class helped me fill in notes on the Spanish process and I taught them about the American process, which is very different. Then I had them silently write the pros and cons of each for a while. After they had written, we came back and discussed pros and cons of each, and I took notes on the board as we went. Finally, I encouraged them to present arguments for which system they would prefer, and we had a vote at the end of class. All in all, even though students had some critiques of the Spanish system's emphasis on testing, they all agreed they preferred it to the American system, which forces students to commodify every detail of their lives and puts pressure on things like athletic performance, artistic skill, "leadership skills", etc. Also they were very disturbed when I told them how much college costs in the U.S., and how consequently many students are forced on a high stakes hunt for scholarships and funding opportunities. It was very interesting to hear this perspective and I now think about my own country's system very differently.

History of American Television

 Level: 2C de la eso

In one of my low-middle ability English classes, I was asked to prepare something for their unit on media. I ended up putting way too much effort in but the result was pretty cool. I created a powerpoint presentation that focused on the history of Television in the United States, with interactive activities every few slides. My interactive activities tended to focus on a certain aspect of American culture like "The White nuclear family", and included watching clips of TV from that era. The presentation ended with a discussion of "TV" today, with questions about social media and streaming services.

Here is the link to the presentation: TV in America: then and now

"Eleanor and Park" Character mapping

Student level: 4D de la eso

In this simple English language arts activity, I led a character analysis on the two main protagontists in the book "Eleanor and Park," which students in a relatively advanced 4 de la eso English class were reading. As we discussed the two main characters, I created a bubble map on the chalkboard to help students visualize the character's qualities. Starting with two bubbles: "Eleanor" and "Park," we expanded the map out as a class, putting qualities that the two characters shared in the middle, connected to both of them. The visual aid also helped expand each quality in the discussion: i.e. adding more details to Eleanor's "hard family life" quality. The activity easily took the entire class period and we could have continued for hours. It was a good entry point into discussion the book as a whole, because following character development can be one of the more difficult aspects of reading fiction but it is one of the most important in making sense of the story/plot.

The prep for the activity was pretty simple, I just read the same chapters of the book as the students and made a little sample bubble map for myself so that I could anticipate different directions the discussion might go and figure out which important points I wanted to steer students toward.