Final assignment: my reflection on summer courses
To make the decision on what to choose for my final assignment was a challenging task because of several obstacles. Firstly, at the moment there were no my students at school as the school year was already over, but there were two groups of other students studying English at summer school. Secondly, the choice of the issues covered during the course I am taking is really wide. But I decided to see all these obstacles as privileges and by all mean make the lessons learner-centred.
To start with, I should say that I had an opportunity to conduct only one class at two different groups of students. My colleagues had to follow a certain program. So I had only 45 minutes in both groups to teach. And in both groups it was the first lesson.
Obviously, I had to start with an ice breaking activity to let the students know each other better and to set a positive atmosphere in class. Though Motivating Teenagers was not the obligatory unit at the courses I study it and found it very useful in my everyday work. The articles of British Council site give an insight into the problem and provide great tips on how to (Motivating the students by Jo Budden – one of my favourite authors). So, I useds questionnaire in order to help my colleagues to personalize the following summer school teaching and start students’ collaboration in class. How it happened was videoed: http://yadi.sk/d/g2xIs3sT76Ae6
The workshop topic I wanted to practice in class was Integrated skills. Traditionally skills are taught separately (or at least there is such a column in the lesson plan table which is obligatory - what kind of lesson is it: listening or writing practice, for example. Now I strongly believe that it can be much more beneficial to teach integrated skills. And one of the arguments in favour of it is the Multiple intelligence theory. By the way, I shared the materials of the workshop with my colleagues and they found them useful and interesting. One of them, Ms Mishatkina, has even chosen it as her self-study methodological theme for the next academic year. So hopefully we will make some positive changes at our school.
I picked up a task suitable for my teaching situation. I think that Task Based Learning is good way to implement integrated skills practice. Again, it was not in our timetable but I watched the video lessons on TBL in course materials and read about Task Based Approach in order achieve my teaching goals. The article by Richard Frost helped me a lot to see the difference between it and PPP approach which is still dominating here. I should say that it worked. Both groups of students I taught, a group of gifted students who took extra classes in June for pleasure, and the group of students who had to go to summer school for two weeks for extra credit liked the way the lesson was organized. Only 3 students out of 15 (5 + 10) chose the answer “in a way” to the question if they liked the first lesson of English they had. All the other answers were “I liked it” which I find very motivating for me as a teacher.
While working on the task students practiced integrated skills: they read the role play cards information, discussed it orally in two groups (sport stars and yellow magazine publishes), took notes while discussing it and the publishers had to take notes on any changes they agree to while producing the role play in pairs as well. As there were an odd number of students in one of the groups, we decided to have a star, a publisher and his secretary whose task was to take the notes.
But there were some problems in the second group and next time I would plan and conduct the lesson differently in the class for lower level students to give them more support. I had expected that it would be different with different class but not that dramatically. I had to make lots of changes during the lesson and it helped in a way.
Firstly, I would split the lesson into two classes of 45 min. The first one would be “Getting to know each other” activity. I would extend it by giving more time for students to communicate during the mingle activity and report the results by every student because they liked the activity and were a little bit frustrated not to speak as long as they could. The pace of the lesson was too fast to half of them. It would be more productive to slow down and then maybe ask them to make a poster out of their notes about themselves, for example, and to put it on the classroom wall. It even could have a continuation – adding materials during their summer school - such materials as pictures, drawings, written works, etc.
So the second lesson would be spent on the role play only.
Secondly, having more time, I would elicit or even pre-teach students grammar structures they needed (reported speech) and some useful phrases for the dialogue to express the opinion politely. Moreover, I would make a kind of template for visual students or a model dialogue for the weakest students to give them more support and the feeling of achievement to motivate them. I could use the audio of the previous students' performance as an example. It would be beneficial for auditory students.
To sum up, I shall say that whatever we do at the lesson we should stick to the main principles of learner-centred classroom. I would put a wall reminder: I teach students, not the textbook! The learning situation depends on thousands of things and the main aim is to make school a better place students want to go to.
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