023 5EN personal information

[blue-m]

overall grade -----  C+

Vocabulary and Structure

The students should be writing down vocabulary and grammar into notebooks. This is crucial for long term memory. It is the basic building blocks for developing meaning in conversation. Students should have at least 10 vocabulary words each week, 15 words would be more ideal. When you are only teaching 6-7 words you are not getting the students ready for fluency by the time they go to university.

Presentation and Directions

This is actually a strength of yours with the exception that your grammar is not always very good. If you invest in a clicker then you will be able to move around the room more and engage with the students more.

Unison Reading

Don't do it!!! This really is a very poor teaching strategy. You lose opportunities to evaluate individual students' abilities and you allow lazy kids to continue being lazy in learning English. Use student names to call on students to read text on the screen or to answer questions. You can say things like, "Class please read along silently as Johnny reads out loud the conversation on the screen."

Classroom management

During the first activity under mechanical practice you were yelling and I really mean yelling above the students talking. Use an attention grabber and get the class quiet before you try to give instructions or talk to the class.

Cooperative Learning

Nothing you did in your lesson was cooperative learning. Cooperative learning is when students work together to solve some sort of problem. Generally we are talking about Bloom's level 5 and 6 questions. Simple recall is not the basis for a good cooperative learning project.

Sentence Scramble

This is actually a very good tool for teaching writing and syntax to students. Ideally this would be done on paper individually with 15-20 examples for the students to practice. The group activity you did would be a good culminating activity for a review at the end of the class. Once again, real learning takes place when students are actively engaging their brains with pencil in hand.

Communicative Practice

This was actually a descent activity for learning communication. Using pictures always helps students learn and should be applied in many more situations. Expanding this idea into a real cooperative learning activity you could have the students brainstorm ideas about what skills they need to have to be the professions they chose.

As a side, teachers should spend way more time on talking about possible future careers. It would give kids so much more focus on learning knowing that the learning really is important to their future.