Week 10: Mircoteaching Reflection

NOTE: Due to human error about 5 minutes of this wasn’t recorded. This was an honest mistake and can’t be helped, so we’ll have to do our best based on the video we do have available and our memories. This should still allow for some positive self- and peer-reflection!

So, just how did my Presentation stage go this week? Take a journey into the lesson with me by watching the video before reading what I think went on.

Pre-video impressions

I felt very positive about my microteaching this time around. Not overjoyed or ecstatic, more of a “I think I’m on the right track” kind of feeling. It helped that I wasn’t too nervous, having tried this class out four times the previous day with my students. I think I kept my T-talk to a minimum (though I may have spoken a little fast) and I allowed my students plenty of time to speak or think through their answers. I think the atmosphere seemed fairly relaxed (I certainly felt relaxed), and while Ss were not entirely forthcoming with their answers, it didn’t seem to be down to the atmosphere. The biggest interruption I spotted was the lack of connection between the speaking and reading activities – it was quite sudden, and may have thrown some Ss off. But overall? I was quite pleased with this assignment.

Post-video reflection:

In comparing this video with my previous microteaching I can spot a few improvements in style. Firstly, I am much more relaxed. I walked around the room and interacted physically a lot better than before (I wasn’t stuck to the podium this time), and my verbal interactions were much less evaluative; I was able to hold more of a conversation with the students. This could also be seen in how I monitored the pair work activity, where before I spent my time waiting for the activity to end by reviewing my lesson plan.

Despite these extra expressions of interest in what my students have to say, it was very interesting to see that when wrapping up the main activity I looked rather uninterested and even impatient. In my mind I was listening carefully and working out what to do, but it clearly didn’t come across this way. I’m really curious to see if I can do this part of an activity without giving this impression. It’d probably be a good start to stop folding my arms and moving around the room restlessly. However, this doesn’t come naturally to me and is hard to spot without a recording. Lots of recording to be done, then. And maybe some time spent in front of the mirror in the mornings.

That said, overall the atmosphere seemed very positive. Ss made good points, and we had fun interacting and coming up with gift ideas (though this may have had something to do with cows!). One point for concern in this area is that I seemed to be cutting off my student’s voices during interaction. While my feedback was largely communicative, I noticed that I occasionally went to one student for an answer, and another would jump in. Rather than giving the first time to complete their answer or to interact with the other student, I jumped on the new interaction and changed the focus to the next student. My intention was to help the first student answer, but I didn’t move back to them to help them produce the answer. I was too keen to move on instead of allowing the S their voice.

In terms of MIC, my whiteboard work seemed excellent. I did exactly what I had planned, and managed to use it as a tool to reduce T-talk, scaffold answers with Ss and even elicit new sentences. I also used the WB to correct errors, helping Ss to identify where the problem was and letting them fix it themselves. I also did this verbally a number of times - only ever helping the S to identify the problems and fix them themselves.

A lot of my other MIC techniques were on the positive side, too. This could be seen well when I explained the reading activity, where I used plenty of gesture and clear speech. Though I got the impression my Ss understood me, I could have made sure of this by getting them to rephrase the instructions or explain what they had to do. Also, to make things really clear I could have shuffled the actual paper rather than using a gesture. Using real examples is usually simpler to understand!

My last worry is that I didn’t give enough time for all of my Ss to interact. They all had a chance to talk during the pair work, but I find that getting one student to speak takes so long that I both forget who has spoken and run out of time to get everyone to speak before the class. I wonder if there is a solution to this or if I will have to use choral repetition to make sure that everyone gets to speak rather than spending the majority of their time listening and watching.

Conclusions

I was very pleased with my microteaching, but have identified areas that need some work. I need to look more engaged and interested in class, and need to make sure I give every student time to use their voice. While I’m using the whiteboard and MIC techniques pretty well, I am still speaking too fast when not using the TLC. These aren’t problems that can’t be fixed, though; I’m confident that I will be able to do something about these and the future issues I spot thanks to this tool of self-reflection. To a brighter future and better reflection!

Week 9: Wrapping Up Activities

One of the great advantages of trying to teach communicative lessons is that it opens up so many more opportunities to just have fun in class. My attempts to give non-corrective feedback are getting much better, and though my students aren't there yet they're getting the idea of our classroom time being a conversation rather than a monologue.

But we want specifics, right? Let's start on the positive side.

My favourite moment from this lesson was my explanation of the first part of the reading activity (from 7:30). I really thought about this and tried to get both the actions and the language as clear as possible, and I think I pulled it off. I told them that:

there is a conversation on the paper (wave of paper),
but that it was mixed up (rolling hands as though mixing).
They had to put it in order (mixing hands now go down in ordered steps)in pairs (two fingers together).
To make sure they understood I gave them another way to understand in telling them:
what the first (one hand at top)and last (other hand at bottom) sentences should be.

I only wish that I have made it a little more communicative by getting the students to either repeat what I was saying or to work out what we had to do. I didn't quite check the comprehension enough, and this showed when I had to go and help a couple of pairs understand what to do after the activity started.

Continuing with the more critical air, I'm feeling the need to work out a better way to wrap up activities. This is something I felt about my micro-teaching assignments so far, too. I find that I can begin and run an activity pretty well, but when everyone comes back together my analysis, guidance, and language focus seem vague and unhelpful. It doesn't help that I can't seem to get my classes to re-focus after communicative activities.

(See 11:45) My first mistake in this class was to choose a couple of boys who probably represent the lowest level English speakers in the class. My aim was to get them involved (because I knew they had the right answer), but they struggled to read it and I was distracted by other students not listening. In order to solve both problems of these I let another pair continue the dialogue. I hadn't, however, considered that they might have different dialogues, and we soon got confused about who was wrong and right. Rather than let the students sort this out I told them outright that one team was wrong, and moved on to one I knew was right.

To avoid this situation I think I needed to get one pair to read their entire dialogue and then get other teams to agree or disagree about the order. This would avoid confusion and allow some more productive dialogue.

I really need to work out how to keep my students engaged when an activity is over, partly through my classroom management but more importantly through being confident and useful when giving my students feedback.

Week 8.1: Setting Up Pair Work

I didn't get far through my video before I found plenty to talk about. The following reflection covers the section of the following video from 0:28 to 3:24.

Before I get into MIC though, I want to make three personal notes. Skip over the bullets if you want pure MIC!

• I didn't realize how much I over-act during my classes. I intend this to show enthusiasm and keep the kids interested, but perhaps it doesn't seem genuine… Perhaps just strange? When I do it to this extent at least.  Maybe I’m just over-reacting to try to make up for lack of control of the class?
• How can I get this class to stop speaking Korean?! And so loudly! Actually, I feel like it’s more important to get them listening first, and I really struggle with this. I can get them quiet and focused for a writing or listening activity, but any time they’re encouraged to speak, the classroom explodes with noise! Anyhow, I need to work on this.
• I found that I spent a lot of time trying to elicit answers from my students. This wasn't helped with phrases designed to elicit answers such as “How can I answer?”, though at least now this is made more clear through my use of the white board (I wrote the start of the answer and pointed to it to provide a scaffold). I feel like I shouldn’t be spending this much time only eliciting answers for a simple greeting (as seen from 0:50-2:08), although it was a part of the TLC for this lesson. Should I just tell them more of the answers to get through it faster? Was it just that I use too many examples? My main worry is that taking this much time will cause my students to lose whatever attention they have left.

Moving on to MIC, then.

The first and most obvious problem with my MIC for this lesson came when trying to get the students to ask each other “How was your weekend?” in pairs. It went wrong from the moment I started suggesting pair work. I remember making an effort to speak slowly, make gestures and paraphrase to make it really clear. Watching the video I’m not sure if I managed this.

First of all, I only used one gesture that even suggested pair work! The rest were me flailing my arms about in very fluid, but completely incomprehensible, gestures. I guess it’s good that I’m moving, but I need to consider ways I can better convey the idea of pair work through gesture. At least doing the same gesture more than once might be a start!

I also made sure to paraphrase my explanation of pair work, too. Unfortunately it was using language my students probably didn’t know, and didn’t come with any other MIC techniques. This is where my extra (helpful) gesturing should have been. Also, I could have perhaps asked one pair to demonstrate what to do.

Another problem with my explanation was that I only implied that the students should start the pair work through my language. Most of them need a clearer starting moment. This meant that the students with better English spoke, but much of the rest of the class looked like lost sheep who gathered they had to do something, but not what. Though it’s not a good idea to interrupt an activity, I felt it necessary to get everyone on track and so continued to give instructions. This gave me a chance to use some much better gesturing, including pointing my hands at two students, then pointing my hands together. My language was still unhelpful though and didn’t point much towards pair work: “together, the girls, the boys…” (my intention being for the two boys and two girls to make pairs in one team).

The most spectacular part of my teacher talk demonstrated to my students just how much I knew what I was doing, and how much I cared about what was going on. At around 2:37 I threw down my hands before me and threw out an offhand comment: “Just talk please”. My attitude in this brief moment demonstrates my frustration with struggling to explain something simple and trying to get the whole class to follow (and listen to) me for once. However I can see how it could have displayed to my students a sense of annoyance or lack of care for the class. Such moments must be detrimental to the classroom atmosphere, and will work against me much more than my over-acted upbeat performance will work for it.

I mustn't let this happen! Classroom atmosphere is everything!

But I really have my work cut out for me with this class. I guess I’ll have to reconsider my approach to teaching them.

Week 8: Focusing on What's Important (CIs and MIC)

I spent the last couple of weeks not recording my lessons with the argument that I don’t have time to prepare a lesson well enough to justify recording them. Sure, I’ve been thinking about CIs and MIC but not enough to make a good, watchable video. Turns out I was missing the point.

This week I subscribed to an alternate philosophy and just record my damn lessons, whatever my level of preparation. That means that when I turned up to work this morning with no lesson plan I recorded the lesson anyway. I had about twenty minutes to think up a lesson about the past tense and the language I’d use to help my students out as much as possible. And so here we have an example of a teacher on the back foot, and a real glimpse at how I teach these days:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUHKNJFjm0A&feature=g-upl

The biggest shock I had after considering my lessons today (I did the same one four times) was the amount of language I assumed my students would remember. At one point I had a list of eight letters on the whiteboard which were supposed to give the students a clue about the past tense verbs we used last Monday. Even though I got them to discuss the answers in groups before I called on students most of them found this activity really hard; I hadn’t made the input comprehensible! I duly changed this in later lessons by giving them an example along with the full present tense verb which they had to change to the past tense.

Must make... input... comprehensible...

Following this, I think I am generally doing a better job of making input comprehensible. I noticed that I’m consciously trying to slow the heck down. I’m using much more gesture, though still not enough. I’m also using the whiteboard much more effectively.

For example, not so long ago I would open the class with the same greeting and answering sequence in the hope that the repetition would allow students to get the hang of it. But at no point had I made it clear how they could answer or what we were saying; I just assumed they would get it. Some of them, it would seem, hadn’t got it. So today I wrote up an introductory question on the board, took them through it (with some choral repetition and comprehension checks here and there to help them out) and then got them to ask each other in pairs before calling on them individually and getting them to ask each other questions in front of the class. They seemed to get it more easily.

Hopefully these techniques will mean there’s more chance the language will stick this time around!

 

Week 5: Clearing Up A Lesson Cut Short

There was a lot left unsaid today, and it seemed as though many of us left class in confusion, irritation or apathy. While I can't claim to answer every question that was left partially answered, I thought it would be valuable to continue the conversation and make sure everyone's on the same page. That's what this post is for!

First, let's quickly go over what we learned, and the context of the last activity:

We have a micro-teaching assignment due in week 6 in which we have to design the Preview section of a lesson based on either reading or listening (receptive skills). We had gotten through all the information about how to write out a lesson plan, and were discussing exactly what the Preview section of a PPP lesson plan focused on reading and listening should entail. We eventually concluded, thanks to Tom's eliciting skills and the combination of our Multiple Intelligences, that a preview needs to include the following elements:

1. Greeting / Relaxing our students
2. Recycling (not reviewing) the TLC from previous lessons
3. Focusing on the topic (aka activating schema)
4. Establishing context (giving the students a reason to listen to / read the material)

I felt that the first two were fairly well covered and understood by the whole group, so will move onto the harder points and the confusion we got into around Jason and Kyle's presentation.

In their presentation of a Preview exercise it was generally concluded that they did an excellent job of activating our schema. We were encouraged to talk about what we were doing these days, and Kyle teacher got to share with us that he is moving house. This led to a natural discussion about our experiences moving house, the things we had to do and what we had to pack. Given the listening dialogue they were given, which I gathered was about someone moving house and a neighbor offering to help out, such questions are a great way of activating students' schema. We were all genuinely engaged and sharing our experiences, and Tom rightly complimented Jason and Kyle's skill in doing this. It's certainly something that my group forgot to include in our plan, and I was very thankful to have had that discussion. I might've missed an important part of the Preview process had it not been brought up.

However, the confusion arose when Tom tried to explain that our Jason and Kyle had not managed to establish the context. It was explained that they had given their students no reason to be overhearing a conversation about moving house in English. Perhaps the confusion arose because the students clearly did have a reason to speak English - the teachers had told them to! This is where we missed the point. The students aren't supposed to be speaking the dialogue or be part of it, they are only going to be listening to the dialogue. It's because they can only hear the dialogue once in real English situations that we really need to activate the schema and establish a context; it gives them a much better chance of understanding and engaging with the conversation.

Let's make sure we've really pinned down what it means to establish context.

We're left with a problem when presenting a listening or reading dialogue in class, namely that language is always used in real situations, and giving our students a dialogue to read or listen to is a completely unrealistic language situation. In reality we almost never simply overhear or eavesdrop on a conversation, but in English classes this is a common occurrence. The challenge is to take an unnatural situation and put it into a real context. In other words, we need to situate the student into the scene as a listener. This will allow students to participate in situated learning.

This was demonstrated by Tom's drawing of an office space on the board. He led us from our desk to the water cooler, where, lone behold! our boss's door was open and we found ourselves in a situation where we could naturally overhear him conversing with someone; this overheard conversation the listening dialogue that we would have listened to had we continued to the next stage of the lesson. It's important to note here that we didn't just jump straight into the situation, we were led to it, and that the students were not a part of the conversation going on, they were merely overhearing it.

Putting our students into a situation in which they could overhear a dialogue without contributing to it was something our group really struggled to do, as we were dealing with a phone call. We spent a number of minutes talking about how the student could be one side of the conversation, as we had forgotten that the student is only going to be listening to it, not speaking. But how can we overhear both sides of the conversation? They're talking on the phone, an activity which by nature only allows an eavesdropper to hear one side of what's being said. So we were faced with the challenge of putting our students into a real situation in which they could hear both sides of the phone call.

I think we managed to come up with a doable idea, and I want to share it to make sure we've really got the idea of establishing context driven home.

The phone call was a conversation between a man and his wife, in which the man was on his way to an important meeting and had left his USB stick at home. The USB stick was the only place he had saved the presentation for this meeting, which he had to attend in half an hour. Since there was no time to bring him the USB stick he gave instructions about where it was, how to access the file and how to email it to him.

How on earth can we get someone to listen in to both sides of this conversation?

The best solution we could come up with was that a boss or team leader was being driven to the same meeting by his personal assistant/team member. This assistant is the man who makes the phone call, who also happens to be in charge of his boss's affairs and therefore has responsibility over preparing the meeting materials. When the boss is double checking that everything is in order, it transpires that the assistant has left the vital USB stick at home, and is forced to call his wife to get the file sent to him. Here's the crucial part: because he is driving he can't simply answer the phone as his hands should be busy keeping the car on the road; he has to put it on speaker phone, and the boss happens to overhear the whole exchange.

How do the students fit into this? They are the boss!

We could begin our Preview by telling the students that today they are the boss (which they are bound to enjoy) and slowly build the situation with them. They have a meeting today. What kind of meeting might they be having? How will they get to the meeting? If you're a boss you no doubt get driven there. If we're going to a meeting we should check everything's in order, so we build a checklist to go through with the personal assistant. Did you bring my suitcase? Is everyone due to arrive on time? Did you prepare the presentation?

And suddenly, in a similar way to how Tom led us to overhear our boss's conversation by the water cooler, our students are imagining themselves in a real situation in which they overhear both sides of a phone call. We have established context with them!

Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, we completely failed to include activation of our students' schema. What is written above is almost all we had time to talk about, so I am very thankful for Jason and Kyle's example.

I hope the thoughts our group had have made exactly what we were trying to pin down in the whirlwind conclusion to yesterday's lesson really clear. I'll summarize it one more time for luck:

When Previewing a listening or reading activity - which I have written in bold font throughout this blog post to really make sure everyone understands that we have to do just this for our micro-teaching assignment - when previewing a listening or reading activity it is vital to activate our students' schema, as demonstrated wonderfully by Jason and Kyle, and also to establish context and make the situation real, as Tom showed us once at the water cooler and I have tried to demonstrate again with the boss overhearing a phone call above.

I think we got there! Thanks for getting to the end of another long post. If I've missed the point or forgotten something important, let's hash it out in the comments. What we didn't have time for in class can continue here!

Week 4: Activating Schema With 3rd Graders

Over my last three years as a teacher I have noticed a couple of things that teachers will do that made no sense to me. For example, the first thing one of my old co-teachers used to do every class was to show her students a plan of the lesson, including the target language and the activity that they could expect. I was silently in opposition to this, as I wanted to surprise the kids with my activities, and create an element of excitement at what may be coming later in the lesson. I might also admit to a fear that telling them to expect something boring (writing, tests etc) would instantly have disengaged them.

I knew another teacher who really liked using books during her lessons. She would choose something related to the target language, and read it with the students. Before doing this, she would show them the cover of the book and ask them questions about it. What's the title, who's it by, what can you see on the front cover, what do you think the book is about... Again, I was impatient and silently wondered why we couldn't just get into the book. After all, the students will find out what's coming soon enough anyway!

Then this last week we learned about schema. And I thought:

Ooooooooooooh....!

I can now see what they were trying to do (though whether it was effective or not is another question altogether) and was instantly persuaded to practice some of this myself. The best opportunity to do so came with my 3rd grade class who are studying how to make simple adjective and noun sentences (It's big. It's an elephant). 

Whatever he sees, he sure looks hungry...

I was very happy when looking through our English department's book collection to find that the teacher mentioned above had left behind 15 copies of the book "Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?". The book is a great demonstration of combining adjectives and nouns in sentences, and is illustrated to match the sentences which follow the pattern of "Blue horse, blue horse, what do you see?", "I see a yellow duck looking at me."

I was pumped to get into teaching the book, and convinced my students would love it, but I couldn't work out how on earth to activate my students' schema before whipping the book and the target language out. I understand how you could discuss daily routines, opinions about an issue or students' experiences before doing a reading activity with an intermediate class, but again and again I feel that these ideas are designed for teaching students how to swim when my students are still splashing around in the bathtub.

Unfortunately I couldn't come to a decision about how best to do this before my class started, so I just went for it and tried out whatever came to mind as I went along. We tried asking students what they could see in the classroom, talking about our favorite animals, and even asking what books they've read.  I also found that just showing them the book got them engaged. Some of them had read it before, others were just interested to see what was inside. Asking them what they thought the bear could see got them thinking in the target language from the previous lessons, and I could see them trying to work it out. They were really engaging with it, and were much readier to receive what the book had to say when we finally got to it.

Awesome!

Every page I tried to get the students to guess what the next animal would be, and they had great fun guessing colours and animals in the context of the target language. I even managed to get around the problem of only the smarter students raising their hands to participate by some crafty tweaks to our classroom points system. The quieter students just needed some encouragement to participate in the classroom arena with the higher-level English speakers.

In just discussing what happened in class yesterday I can see a big difference in my teaching. Almost everything I described above fits into a dialogic discourse model in which I encourage the students' participation and interaction. We're getting somewhere, people!

Now if only I had planned the lesson enough and had the foresight to bring my camera to work with me to see just how different my teaching looks these days. That'll have to be an aim for next week!

Week 3.1: Settling on a Reflective Research Question

This week I chose not to dive straight into choosing my Module 1 paper topic. Instead I wanted to spend the week reflecting further on my classes and making sure I had a good grasp of the CI techniques as lain out by Xie. It’s proving quite a challenge!

The class I recorded for my week 1 assignment, which is due to be the focus of the paper, is full of what I thought CI techniques to be before I read Walsh and Xie. This means that I gave the techniques we learned for our week 2 test a full run, and felt I had been very successful at it; after all, I had included a good percentage of them within a 12 minute clip.

Xie revealed to me, however, that almost everything I did in that class was unadulterated monologic IRF discourse. This was a big shock, hence the overflow of regret in my most recent post. It’s not that I consider the use of monologic discourse entirely unhelpful, but it often compromised the entirety of my classes!

Since then I’ve been doing my best to discover just what dialogic discourse could look like in my elementary classes to varying degrees of success. It is these changes that are causing me problems with the paper; the difference between the video and my classes now is just so large!

I would like to be able to tie my current practices with the contents of that video, but have had difficulty coming up with a reflective research question that ties them all together. Whatever route I consider taking the conclusions seem a little removed from the original purpose.

The best I have come up with until now is the following: To what extent can using a variety of CI techniques within a purely monologic IRF discourse aid L2 learning?

I would set out my attempt to engage the students with the techniques learned for the week 2 quiz, cover a couple of specific instances where the techniques didn’t work, and demonstrate the strengths of drilling language in the context of large classes. The conclusion might be that while the technique is useful to an extent, its overuse results in learners with a very narrow language proficiency characterized by asking and answering a set of questions rather than developing the ability to communicate fluently. Action to be taken would include the things I’ve been trying in my classes since then.

Looking over this post again my proposal doesn’t sound too bad. Then again, lots of the things I think look good on paper until I try discussing them out loud. Maybe I should read Xie one last time just to make sure I’ve got this down…