Lesson: Discuss questions and settings based on a short story the class had read.
Date: November 8th, 2022
This class consisted of a small group of level-5 (Upper Intermediate) students with a variety of cultures and languages. The objective of this lesson was for students to work through a worksheet in partners or groups and then discuss it with the class. The material in the worksheet varied from discussion questions to matching to fill in the blank.
The lesson focused primarily on reading and speaking. Students had to read questions and topics from the worksheet. Students also discussed openly with the whole class.
This lesson was taught a bit differently, instead of students being in multiple groups or pairs they worked in one main group. This was because there were fewer students than normal and so the lesson plan had to be altered to accommodate for that.
I found that working with students in one large group felt very comfortable and made guiding the lesson much easier. When a student had an issue with a question it was brought up to the group and other students were welcome to answer if they were able to. This also allowed students to actively agree or disagree with the answer of their classmates.
Reflecting on this lesson, I would like to attempt a similar teaching strategy again, since this one was a consequence of attendance. I would like to work on keeping the class on task since many students used the casual aspect of this lesson to elaborate on their lives which did not pertain to the current activity.
If I were to teach this lesson again I would like to focus more on time management and keeping students on task. I would also like to refine the discussion questions to better suit the time we had in class.