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. 

Methodology - Week 6 Lesson Plan In Action (Main Describing Activity)

Methodology - Week 6 Lesson Plan In Action (Main Describing Activity)

Methodology - Week 6 Lesson Plan in action (intro)

Methodology – Reflection Week 6

I once again had most of this week’s classes canceled due to school events or the public holiday. This has given me time to deal with STG assignments, but as I work multiple part-time contracts, if I don’t work I don’t get paid.

Nonetheless, I did have some classes and managed to record the one 6^th grade class for my lesson plan assignment. With all the cancelled classes this week I only had one shot at the recording. Furthermore, I had to interrupt the class scheduled textbook activity, to insert a more dialogic discourse activity.

Having limited time and opportunity to get this homework assignment done, I found myself rushing a little bit. When showing the PowerPoint and asking a question to activate the students schema, I would then rapidly fire off the answer or echo the students answer, in order to move the lesson on more rapidly.

We then moved on to the main activity of having three opposing teams of students describe an image to their team artist. No Korean was allowed to communicate, but the students were allowed to point out the location of nouns on the paper. With the co-teacher and I moderating the game, it went fairly well. I was a little frustrated to see that under pressure, some of my star students reverted back to very basic sentences, or just answering with single words. They are usually able to better express themselves, in a more relaxed setting. I should keep this in mind for future discussion activities.

In retrospect I should have had the students engage in more pair work in order to enable more authentic interaction. By simply asking the students to come up with five nouns and five adjectives, after explaining those concepts, they would better remember the target language I was trying to teach. I justified the long PPT vocabulary refresher with the fact that the main activity was strong in dialogic discourse, but this doesn't excuse the opportunity cost of my monologic introduction.

Methodology - Class Reflection Week 5

 I wanted to try and evaluated a continued T – initiated dialogic with my 3^rd grade students this week as my module 1 paper research question reflects on what discourse i.e. monologic or dialogic, is best for young learners in the classroom. However , the 3^rd grade students have gone on a field trip so this was not possible. Furthermore, at my second job we have been wrapping up testing students input and output abilities. This was followed by English Movie day where the students get to relax after a big test. They did have to complete a comprehension sheet based on the movie, but this was still out of the field of monologic / dialogic ratio that I wanted to measure.

I have scheduled a strong dialogic lesson for Monday where the students have to look at a series of pictures and then describe what they see to their partner who has to redraw the image. The class is continuing to learn about adjectives this week, and I thought this may be a fun exercise for them to try.

I am shifting power back to the students and hoping that they don’t trash my lesson planning. I’m willing to give a more dialogic centered approach in the classroom a try, but if somebody gets stabbed with a pencil, I may have to rethink this whole concept. 

Methodology - homework week 3

Task 1A: Read Johnston Chapter 2: Answer Questions 1, 5, and 6.

Also- considering pages 32-35 ‘The dilemma of Voice in the Classroom’, have you had any experiences like Mary’s with a student or students who remind you of Young? Does this chapter shed a new or brighter light on those experiences? If yes, how?

1.) What rules for attendance and participation do you have in the classroom? What values underlie these rules? What oral messages might be sent by them? How else might the rules be set up?

I don’t check the attendance of my students, nor do I follow up with the parents why a student was absent. These tasks fall towards my Korean co-teachers. If a student does walk into the classroom late, I prefer that they just take their seat as quickly as possible and not interrupt the lesson. On occasion I have had to discipline students who walked in late, shouted a greeting to their friend, and then loudly made themselves at home while interrupting my whiteboard explanation.

As to participation in the lesson, I will try and get as many students to answer as possible. That said I won’t try and burst one of my own gaskets by forcing an introvert to give a extrovert answer. I have one student in my class who will not openly communicate in class other than to whisper in another student’s ear and have them speak for him. I have another student that refuses to speak English or Korean, but faithfully completes his written work. He isn’t being contrary, he is just painfully shy.

5.) Take a look at the course book you are currently using. How does it position the learners: to what extent does it encourage their active participation, and to what extent does it treat them merely as passive receivers of information?

The government text books used at my public school almost exclusively treat the students as passive learners. They watch short badly acted video clips of conversations and then repeat that dialogue. I am forced by policy to design a lesson relating to whatever pages the Korean teachers are in the textbook. That said, I never use the actual textbook itself.

My second job uses four different levels of the same brand textbook. “Everybody Up”.  It does a better job of getting the students involved on different levels. It has listen and point, vocabulary expansion, comprehensions, open questions, and structured sentence building exercises.

e.g.

 

6.) Think about the rules and regulations in force in your classroom that come from your department, school or institution, school district, state, and so on. Do you ever go against these rules? In what circumstances? Do you ever find your own values at odds with the values implicit in the rules you are obliged to follow? What happens in such situations?

As I previously mentioned in my blog, I’ve had school management change students report card grades without consulting me. I was expected to fall in line with vice-principals decision and not make waves. That same school also had a massive discipline problem with students disrespecting teachers. We were not allowed to hit, scold or raise our voices to students. Extra homework was simply ignored. So I introduced a detention system where I would (sometimes after physically fetching the student) detain the problem students in my classroom for the majority of their break time.

I did this alone for a year, and the following year all the other English teachers followed my example and we set up a schedule. In the second year the students complained in their end year surveys that they did not like detention. So management made a push to remove it. This combined with the report card fixing, and a request to relocate my homeroom to a classroom in the basement with no windows, prompted me to look for greener pastures.

More recently at my second job, I clashed head with the co-ordinater / manager of the program. The job involves working in a culture centre program that is made available to local neighborhood kids. They teach Spanish, Persian, Chinese and English (English being the largest program). I taught my beginner class (A Class) phonics in the first semester and most of those students can now sound out sentences.

As is the nature of things some students quit the program and management wanted to fill in the empty seats. So I was told to interview four new students. None of them know the alphabet. I explained that putting these kids in the second semester class now would leave them feeling frustrated as the other kids are already reading. I also pointed out that having these students attempt the new more advanced textbook would require the majority of the teachers’ attention in class to support them. In short, that it was just a dumb thing to do.

If you can’t sound out c-a-t, then reading “Do you like potatoes? Yes, I like potatoes” from the textbook is going to be a stretch. 

Nevertheless, the new additions were added to the roster. Three girls and one boy. They take up all our time, often grind the lesson to a halt, and the boy is prone to crying when he can’t understand something.

I thought of making a video of him weeping and emailing it to the manager, but we just patched up our relationship since last having words over this issue. I’m reluctant for us to start clawing at each other again.

I don’t blame the kids. They’re adorable. But I’m still bitter about how often teachers’ input is asked for then summarily ignored.

 Like comments on the weather.

M: Nice weather today isn’t it?

T: Well the weatherman predicted showers in the…

M: Yeah yeah go get me coffee.

Task 2B: Consider  the ACTFL proficiency guidelines.

Choose two of the classes you teach with you feel have different proficiency ranges. In other words one group is generally lower in all four skills areas than the others. Read the guidelines, and identity the ranges of each class in each skill, citing specific examples from both the guidelines and your classroom data/ observations / anecdotes. Write up your conclusions here, as briefly but completely as possible.

B class on Tuesdays and Thursdays 3:30pm to 5:00pm

D class on Tuesdays and Thursdays 5:00pm to 6:30pm.

	B Class
Speaking	Novice mid	“Teacha I dlink water?”
Writing	Novice high	“Mr. M good teacha. Play run game.”
Listening	Intermediate low	- students understand basic repetitive instruction e.g. show me your  homework.
Reading	Intermediate low	Extract from their class textbook: A camping trip. Hi everybody! I’m camping with my family. I like canoeing and fishing in the river. We always wear life jackets and helmets. I’m not good at canoeing, but it’s fun! - students understand the story if given some context.

	D Class
Speaking	Intermediate low	“Mr.M may I have a drink for water?”
Writing	Intermediate mid	Extract from most recent test – If your parents asked you to stay home and miss a party, so you could help them, would you do it? Why? S1 : I could help them because I have a two older sisters.         So my sisters will be help them. S2 : I’ll stay home because I will play computer game in the home. S3 : I will do it because I can go to the party next time.
Listening	Advanced low	Students can listen to a proposed argument to engage in basic debate
Reading	Advanced low	Extract from their class text book The water cycle has four parts. The first part is evaporation. When water is hot, it evaporates. This means it changes from a liquid into a gas called water vapor and moves into the air. - On their most recent reading test most students were able to complete this article relatively easily, only stumbling on words like ‘evaporation’, ‘condensation’ or ‘precipitation’.

Reflect on your module 1 paper. What aspects will you focus on in your paper?

I will cover a broad range of classroom interactions in my paper. The CI's I will focus on will be monologic / dialogic ratio, scaffolding and shifting from closed type to open type questions.