I started off my presentation stage by having the students ask me what I did last weekend, and I told them that I watched my hometown baseball team lose in the World Series. I made an effort to not speak more then 2-3 sentences before I asked a question I then had the students open their books and we started the daily topic, which was "sports". The grammar rule for the day was "I used to..... but know I do not" . I engaged the students with the things they "used to do", and I gave the example that I used to date Kim Tae Hee in 2010,, thus, i used to "kiss" Kim Tae Hee, but Now i do not (Using Kim Tae Hee and the verb kiss seemed to get the student's attention, and I was often called a liar). Next I asked the class to discuss different things that they "used to do" but now no longer do. I set the students up in pair so that they could practice the daily lesson, and then we discussed the topic as a class, using chaining, choral repetition, the WB and eliciting techniques.
It was a "hit and miss day" because I sometimes used excessive Ttalk in class. The class I recorded (see below) is a prime example of EVERYTHING that can go wrong. Half the class was missing due to a recording project for their department, and half of the class that WAS present was "hung over" and even one student was arrested for fighting while drunk the week before so i had trouble keeping the class on target with the daily topic. This is the class which has the highest English Skills 9that I teach), but due to the circumstances involved in the day, as well as me not being as prepared as i should had been, led to the perfect storm when it came to the reading exercise. I practiced the reading exercise with other classes (before this class) so that i could "perfect it' when it came time to do my recording with my "best class" however results were awful.
Since i recorded my listening exercise 2 weeks ago, this is a recording of a "reading exercise... well it is an attempt to get it started... which I did not. Back to the drawing board.
Hey, I'm just curious you chose your best class as opposed to a class that might have been better served by your reflection on a video of your interaction with them? Also -- why don't you reflect on the video? You say it's a perfect storm, but can you critique your interactions from this class that you share with us in the film? At the beginning of this post you detail a sequence of CIs from a lesson you didn't film. What about this one?
ReplyDeleteWill do. I just hated watching this video. I gave myself enough of a beating on the Micro-teaching, and it's difficult to continuously watch yourself tumble and fall. But yeah, you're right, self reflection is done best when there is actual footage.
ReplyDeleteAs for why i chose this class, long story short, I also did video HW for ICC this week, and the ICC assignment took a long time to set up as I had to constantly be on the students so that hey didn't cheat during the cultural awareness "card game". I can go into more detail tomorrow in class (if you want). But simply put, ICC was very time consuming, and this was one of the few classes that I didnt do the ICC HW in.
You can tell from the start of the video that I engaged my students in real conversation. One of my students was arrested last weekend for fighting at a bar and we joked about the situation. I engaged the students in this matter in hopes to lower the class's affective filter. I also chained questions to ensure that every student was alert, and I used choral repetition when I focused on proper grammar usage. I tried not to single-out one student when mistakes were made so that (once again) the affective filter would not be raised.
ReplyDeleteI also think I did a good job of gesturing (with my hands) and I used the WB to reinforce what i was teaching. I do notice that I rushed some students through their replies (which is bad) and I did correct students at times (affective filter) and at times I didn't engage in a conversation. I also noticed that I should have put the students into PW first (when i introduced sports) before I asked them to answer the sports questions. However, 'What's your favorite" was already covered earlier in the semester, so i didn't feel the need to do PW with this exercise first. I also think that I introduced the daily topic well (which was sports).
The problem arose when I started the reading exercise, which was "ordering sentences" from the Hammer book. I did a short article on Bo Jackson, a sports star who played both Football and Baseball. However, once I got to the the reading lesson (I introduced different equipment used for different sports), I began to lose the interest of my students. I am partly to blame on this, because I didn't always "isolate" the response that I wanted. However, when I did trail off I noticed the problem and tried to get back on target. By the time the reading exercise was about to be executed, we were already in class for over an hour and just came off a break. Some student were sleeping during the break and getting them motivated to do work was a task within itself, since (as I mentioned before) many of the students had gone drinking the night before. A second video is attached to this blog which shows the start of my reading activity.