Today I did my second hour of teaching. This class was my first class actually delivering a lesson, as last time was just an introduction. My partner Sally and I worked with the class on discussion skills and recognizing and using discussion phrases for expressing opinions, agreeing, disagreeing, responding, verbal feedback, and confirming meaning. We did a warm-up activity that was a leftover activity from last week, we played jeopardy to review discussion phrases, and we had the students have a discussion about seasons in pairs.
In our warm-up activity, we asked the students to share their strengths in English speaking and what they hope to improve this semester. This was meant to be the closing activity last week, but we ran out of time. We still thought it was important, so we moved it to this week. I am not sure how well this activity went. It seemed not everyone fully understood what we were asking, but it did give us some idea of what the students want to work on. The most common area the students wanted to improve was vocabulary, which may be different to work into our communication lessons, but we will have to try to think of ways to incorporate it.
To go over discussion phrases, we played jeopardy. I led this activity. Students were given a phrase and had to identify what it is used for in discussion. I thought the game was too time-consuming and I did too much talking beforehand. I had to explain how the game is played which took some time, and I had to explain what the questions and answers would be like which also took time. While playing the game, I was not sure if anyone was actually enjoying it or learning from it. Leading the game was challenging because I could not see anyone. I had no idea if the students were really engaged or not. However, they all participated and all seemed to have a grasp on the language of discussion, so that was good to see. The game did help me to assess what the students already know. After the game, I reviewed the phrases that were in the game. I felt like I was talking too much, and I did not know how much I needed to say.
Next, the students were paired up to have discussions. I think the discussions went well overall. It was a good idea by Sally to put the students in pairs. When I have observed this class before, the students did discussions in groups of three or more, and there was almost always someone who did not speak. By putting them in pairs, everyone had to speak because it was a one-on-one conversation. Participation in this discussion was the best I have seen from this class, so that was great to see.
What we were missing from the discussions was the discussion language. Because we wanted the students to use this language, it needed to be displayed during the discussion as a prompt. I had to move between two groups as Sally was acting as another student’s partner. In the first group, I displayed the discussion language. Because I did this, one of the students was really making an effort to use the language which I was very happy to see. Halfway through the discussion time, I moved to the other group. They did not have the discussion language displayed, but I did not want to interrupt their discussion by jumping in, displaying the list, and explaining what I was doing. They were having a good discussion so I let them keep talking. However, the objective of using the discussion language was not met in this group. After the discussions, the students were meant to present each others’ opinions. We ran out of time and only one pair got to present. I was happy with the group that presented, though. They accurately shared what they had discussed and they remembered a lot of details so I was impressed. We told the other students they will have to present next time, but I am not sure they will remember what they talked about.
The main challenge in this lesson was time. We are still working on getting a feel for how long activities take. This time we definitely spent too much time on the game and not enough on the discussion, which was supposed to be the bigger focus in the lesson. Next time, I think we should just prepare one discussion activity and spend more time on it. We should also bring back the discussion phrases and make sure they are displayed during the discussions so the students are more likely to use them.