This week I taught another successful Advanced Communication class. My teaching partner and I decided to progress the students’ skills and introduce some language and strategies for summarizing. This week only four out of six students were present, which actually worked well, as it allowed each student to have more time to speak. Each week I see great improvement in the students’ participation, and with only four students present they all stepped up to the challenge of participating even more than usual. I have been very pleased to see this progress.
My partner and I tried a new warm-up activity this week to introduce summarizing skills. I asked the students to choose a favourite movie and to answer a few questions which combined to create a summary of the movie. The activity was successful—all of the students were able to answer the questions. One student answered the questions in far more detail than I was looking for, and certainly far too much detail for a summary, but in his defense, I had not mentioned that this was a summarizing activity. This student often dominates discussions, however, and his enthusiasm can take up a lot of class time. I am always reluctant to cut him off because I want to encourage him and boost his confidence, but I think my partner and I may need to start limiting his participation to give the other students more opportunity to speak.
After the warm-up I gave some instruction on summarizing. I always have a hard time evaluating how effective my teaching is when giving a lesson as in the virtual setting I have no way of gauging the students’ level of attention or understanding. I tried to make my lesson more interactive than in the past by having the students turn on their microphones and say some phrases. They all did this, so that showed me they were at least somewhat engaged. We also incorporated some assessment into our class’s exit activity as we asked the students to tell us a “do” or “don’t” of summarizing that they remembered from the lesson. All of the students were able to list something, so it was validating to know that they did get something out of the lesson.
After the lesson, the students had a discussion about movies. We changed the post-discussion presentations to have a summarizing focus, and I think the students were somewhat confused by the exercise but if we do it again I think they will know what to do next time. I also heard all of the students try the summarizing language that was introduced in the lesson, and they all used it correctly, so that was nice to see.
In the next class I think we should continue working on summarizing skills to assess the students’ learning from one week to the next. Our sponsor teacher also suggested working on some grammatical points, such as emphasizing the ‘s’ on the end of third person singular verb conjugations. I will be thinking of creative ways to work this grammar point into the next lesson. Our sponsor teacher had some good suggestions for using visual reminders for grammar, so I think I might want to try this strategy.