This week was another successful class. Five students were present, all from China. This week we returned to practicing summarizing skills and also incorporated a grammar review of the third person singular verb conjugation.
My partner and I tried something new for our lesson opening, which was providing a “hook” to get the class started. Before introducing our goals for the day, we showed a piece of art that represented our topic for this class (health) and asked the students to guess the topic based on the picture. This was successful in engaging the class right from the start and I think we will continue to use this technique moving forward.
I was very happy with the students’ level of engagement this week. Throughout the practicum it has often been a challenge to get the female students to participate as much as the male students. This week I saw great participation from all three female students. My partner and I have been designing our lessons lately to require all of the students to provide a summary of their group discussions. I think this lesson structure has aided the level of participation, but I can also see that the students are just becoming more comfortable and confident. In the past it has been challenging to get the female students to participate when they have been specifically called upon, but now they are sometimes even participating voluntarily. Seeing this progress has boosted my confidence as a teacher as it makes me feel I am doing something right.
Working on the third person singular grammar focus also worked quite well. Our sponsor teacher pointed out last week that most or all of the students were dropping the final ‘s’ on third person singular verbs. She suggested that we could review this point and enforce it throughout the lesson by holding up a card each time a student forgot the ‘s’. The review showed me that all of the students knew that the ‘s’ was supposed to be there, they were simply forgetting to pronounce it. I saw a lot of self-correction when I held up the card, and after being shown the card a few times some of the students started to catch themselves and make the correction without the card.
I have been thinking about how I would foster the same level of engagement and participation that I have in this class in a class with more students. I think doing so would be easier in-person as group discussions can be easily monitored. Online, I think the class would have to be formatted differently. In a bigger class, I think I would do the same discussion activities but assign roles to help keep the discussions on task. For example, a leader, a note taker, and a presenter. Each week I would ensure each student had a different role than the time before. This way, even if there was not time for me to listen to each student speak individually, I would know they were developing skills in the group discussions. They would have to perform their assigned role to ensure the designated presenter would have adequate information to give a presentation.