Date: September 28th, 2022
ESAL 0120/0220 is a level 1 and 2 split class focusing on English grammar.
Observations:
- The teacher reminds students of their homework.
- The teacher tells students they will be revising past/past progressive tenses.
- The students are organized into 4 groups.
- Students practice speaking. (~15mins)
- The teacher hands out the verb tense worksheet to students. (~30mins)
- Students are put into pairs.
- Break (~10 mins)
- The teacher reviews the worksheet with students. (~10mins)
- The students were given a very busy picture that they must describe in the past progressive tense. (~20mins total)
- Students were given 5 minutes to practice their sentences.
- Students must recount what they saw from memory.
- The teacher moves the class to the next activity.
- Students are tasked with walking around the class and discussing their homework with two other classmates. (~10mins)
- Students are allowed to hand in their homework if they feel confident. Or they can drop it off at the teacher’s office.
- The teacher gives out new homework.
Reflection:
This class was in a fairly open room with good natural lighting. At the front of the class were the teacher’s desk, two whiteboards, and the projector screen. The students were seated in chairs with their desks attached. These chairs were able to be wheeled around very easily. The one downside to this room is that it was a little small for the class size, so when one of the student activities required students to move around the space became quite chaotic. It was very convenient for the chairs to be moved around when they weren’t needed by students.
The teacher instructed that class that due to many questions and concerns they didn’t feel comfortable moving forward with the class. Instead, he would be using this class time to review the material (simple past/past progressive). The teacher provided new material for students to work on in groups or pairs throughout the lesson.
Since this was a review class the teacher knew what the students had and had not covered prior to this lesson. This can be a benefit to the instructor since by this point the teacher should know what the general strengths and weaknesses of the class are. There were some issues involving some of the worksheet sentences which used gerunds and many irregular verbs, as well as modals.
The teacher mostly used yes/no questions in order to elicit information. This is important to know that since this is a lower-level class students may not be familiar with or confident enough to respond to wh- questions.
This class used most language skills. From speaking and listening when practicing speaking the verb tenses in their groups. Groups also used reading and writing skills while working on the worksheet. Speaking was used throughout the lesson as well when creating sentences from the image given. Every student was called upon to participate in activities or produce answers from their group work. This increases overall participation and stops 1 member of the group from doing all the speaking.
Students responded positively to the activities. However, at the start of class students were resistant to moving to their group and some of them forgot which group they were supposed to join. One of the activities was working on the homework so some students which had done their homework finished very quickly. The teacher noticed this and provided them with some optional work if they were bored.
The atmosphere of the class varied a lot throughout the lesson. In the beginning, the class seemed a bit awkward and confused about the instructions given by the teacher. Though a bit confused students were comfortable enough to ask the teacher and observers questions regarding some of the questions. There were many questions due to the fact that one of the activities used intermediate-level sentence structure.
Students were engaged with the content. Since all of the activities involved pair and group work students became very comfortable with each other and therefore more engaged. Some students finished faster than other students and once students had finished they either engaged in casual conversations or went on their phones. Since students had nothing else to do, this was allowed.
What I learned from this observation is to make sure that the material you are providing is not too difficult for the level you are teaching at. I also learned that allowing students to check their homework with one another is a great way for students to give themselves an informal evaluation before submitting it to their teacher.
For this lesson, I would change some of the material used to be more relevant to their skill level. Some of the images used by the students were photocopied, so much of the image quality was lost, and hard to tell what is going on. I would also provide clear explanations to students about which group they were part of. Perhaps either through card handouts or writing them on the board.