Teaching an English class for the first time

My name is Christina Morgan. I am 22, and last year I graduated from Cardiff University with a Masters in Creative Writing. I am currently enrolled onto the first year of the PGCE programme in Pembrokeshire College, where I am also doing my teaching placement. Yesterday I taught my first GCSE English lesson. Now, looking back at the lesson with a less stressed-out head, I can say that it went better than I thought. In fact, I actually really enjoyed teaching the class. Finding resources and back-up activities was a challenge leading up to the week; I kept on thinking: 'Is this material right for a GCSE class?' And: 'Am I setting too much for a one hour class?' I guess this was all part of the learning process. My topic to teach was 'Dialogue', and I tried thinking outside of the box to teach the class in an interesting and new way. This, I discovered, was easier said than done and after trawling through ideas online I came up with four key activities I wanted to approach with the class. The first, was to start off with a short quiz on what pupils already knew about the rules of dialogue. From this quiz, I taught the class the aims of dialogue and rules of punctuation from a PowerPoint presentation. Even with not having much experience with SMART Boards, this did not prove to be a disaster. It worked, although, at some points I felt like I was conducting a lecture more than a class. To get the pupils involved, I paired students up to work on their own dialogue and to use all of the tips they had learnt from the day's lesson. We went through each pair's work and they got to try out some drama skills by performing what they has written. All in all, the lesson proved to run much more smoothly than I had anticipated. Teaching isn't as scary after all! First lesson: DONE. I look forward to reporting back on more teaching experiences and my use of technology with learning.