Methodology - Week 7 – Reflection on week 6 LP and Micro Teaching

 For this weeks reflection I want to look at the week 6 lesson plan activity that I ended up teaching and video recording in class. We did a micro teaching presentation to the other teachers in class on last Saturday, where we took the first 10 minutes of our lesson Plan (LP), and taught it to our peers who role-played the part of our students.

While role-play can be a useful tool to simulate a certain experience, I felt like it fell short in this instance. While I value, and have the utmost respect for our lecturers, and their methods, I felt that this 10 minute simulation did not convey a real picture of what was really happening in the classroom.

Allow me to further explain my thoughts. By taking only the first 10 minutes of the class, we could not showcase in our micro teaching the monologic / dialogic ratio that was intended for the lesson. In my particular case I went into the planning process, fully embracing the idea that my first 10 minutes would be strongly teacher initiated monologic discourse, followed by 30 minutes of almost pure dialogic discourse. That is a ratio of 25% monologic content Vs 75% dialogic content. However, because of the 10 minutes time limit on the mini simulation, the situation is taken out of context and to my fellow teachers, my intro probably looked too stiff and monologic.

Bottom line: I had an idea of how my LP would go. IMHO it worked in the actual lesson, and I was impressed with the results. Watch the main activity video below, and you see students communicating with each other, albeit in basic English, all negotiating for meaning to make themselves understood.

The monologic visual scaffolding (PPT) used was effective in activating the students schema in all the nouns and adjectives that they would come across when describing the three set pictures that I handed out to each student team. This fact was probably lost in the simulation, where my students didn’t even get to see the pictures. Taken out of context, the LP PPT intro probably just seemed too long. However, I was using it to set up the next dialogic activity with strong foundation in a short amount of time. Something that monologic discourse excels at.

All this being said, the LP probably did not impress in the STG simulation, with it being seen as completely monologic for the 10 minute duration.  Should this really be how the LP is to be judged? Are we learning and practicing these techniques to look good in a 10 minute simulation in front of our peers? Or are we learning these techniques to be better teachers in the actual classroom?

I don’t want to come off as making excuses, I already admitted I could have made the intro more dialogic than I did. At the time however, I justified the 5-10 minute monologic schema activation sequence with the fact that a 25-30 minute dialogic activity was just about to follow. As STG students, I would like us to keep in mind the context of each other’s lesson plans as a whole, so as not to pigeonhole each other’s efforts into stiff absolute categories.