Colin CO#2

CO Blog #2

Date/Time: 5/8/2017 10:00AM-10:50AM

Topic/Skill: 1A Composition – punctuation, capitalization

Teacher Presentation: Victoria Davis conducted this course. She began with distributing handouts and writing the agenda on the board for both the day and for the week. Compared with the previous class, a 3B level grammar class, there seemed to be more instruction and less pair or group work. Some individual work was also done, but the time devoted to these activities seemed smaller than the time devoted to sharing the results. More collaborative work was done than solo work. Since there was more teacher-oriented instruction in this class than the 3B grammar class, I’d say this was closer to a deductive model of learning, but it wasn’t entirely teacher-focused, and definitely followed up instruction with opportunities to practice.

Classroom Management: Both classes observed were (mostly) attentive and well behaved, but there seemed to be nearly no issues in this class at all. Everyone seemed eager to learn and happy to be in class. Early in the class period, somebody entered the room to deliver some paperwork to a student without explaining it well, despite the student having somewhat limited English proficiency, so the teacher took the time to go over it with the student for a few minutes so that she would be well aware of what the document dealt with.

Materials: handouts, white board

Student Participation: Students worked in pairs or individually at various points of the class, and shared answers after such work.

Feedback Provided: When answers for group or individual work were shared, the teacher provided quality feedback. Additionally, she stopped to explain several new points that came up incidentally, such as ordinal number writing conventions and pronunciation, Roman numerals, and how to write and say dates, even though these aren’t necessarily within the scope of the primary topics (punctuation and capitalization).

Lesson(s) on teaching you learned: This was a good follow-up to the 3B grammar course, because it demonstrated how different approaches to learning can accommodate different proficiency levels. I think the main reason for the more teacher-oriented nature of this class compared to the other is that the students are simply less proficient in English and need more instruction time, whereas the 3B grammar class is a little more advanced and the students are ready to get down to the work of practice a bit more quickly.