Peer observation 1

Going to watch Elyse’s morning lesson on the 13th of December last year was the first lesson I’d ever observed outside of a school I worked in – exciting stuff. Knowing a few teachers from St. Giles, I had a rough idea of what to expect, but was personally really interested in seeing how similar class contexts were to Eurocentres – things like nationality ratios, available materials and resources, classroom layouts and so on. In the end these were almost identical, except for the IWB in every room in St. Giles. These contextual similarities had the benefit of drawing attention to the less tangible similarities and differences in teaching and learning.

I had set out to look for how target vocabulary was dealt with – when watching myself teaching and peer-reviewing it with Roo, I noticed my tendency to over-explore areas of vocabulary. When discussing the Lexical Approach during the Methodologies module, and at a few other times during the course, I’ve been reminded that there’s a limited number of new lexical items that can be retained with any reliability or potential for future use. This is one of those things that I know in theory, but often seem to forget in lessons. The video of my own vocabulary-based lesson which we watched ended up in a mass of words on the board, and more extensive teacher-led discussion than was necessary of an overly large lexical group. I wanted to see how Elyse approached this, thinking about productively exploring the use of target vocabulary, without descending into wordy chaos.

Lesson narrative and exploration:

The lesson’s aims were using detailed adjectives to describe things eliciting strong reactions in us – disturbing, iconic, life-affirming etc. – and also a review of simple and continuous aspects.

When I arrived (9.40) the TL had already been introduced, and T was encouraging SS to debate what was shown in some images on the screen. Afterwards, there was a whole-class discussion focused on describing the images and how they could affect viewers. This was helped by T’s willingness to allow gaps in the discussion, and wait out silences without moving on. The discussion was used to clarify correct use of the adjectives, allowing SS to question their application to the images and negotiate their meaning with T. Concept checking questions were used to facilitate this. The material was used excellently to elicit and check the vocabulary – discussion was kept concise and functional, sticking to the target langauge.

During the next stage (9.52), SS worked in pairs to consolidate the vocabulary via sentence completion, for personalisation of meaning. T was monitoring, to add clarification or elicit responses. (The timing was a little bit unclear, but like we talked about afterwards, this happens a lot! When I tell SS “two minutes left!”, I usually mean “get on with it!”, not actually that I’m going to end the activity in two minutes. This was the first time I noticed this from the other side, and now I’m certain that students realise this is what’s happening – but they still respond to it in the way we want, so does that make it O.K.? Interesting.) Other SS were brought into conversations arising between T and specific pairs of SS, to good effect – T used more forthcoming pairs to draw other SS’ attention to different uses and applications for the vocabulary, and to provide freer opportunities for it to be used. A SS whose partner had left the room was drawn into a TL-relevant conversation by T. Emergent opportunities to focus on use of the TL were thoroughly taken advantage of.

The lesson moved – very CELTAishly – from this controlled practice into a freer, semi-controlled mill drill (10.05), SS questioning and justifying each other’s personalisations of the sentences. T monitored very closely, choosing to interact with specific pairs of SS to continue negotiating meaning and generally discussing the topic. This is different to how I usually manage a mill drill, which was a point of interest which we discussed later.

This rounded up the first aim – in the last part of the lesson (10.15), T reactivated the previous day’s work on simple and continous aspects using a gap fill excercise about a photographer’s working life. In feedback, responses were opened up to peer review before T feedback and pronunciation was touched on. T then dictated a pair of example sentences (10.30) from which SS inductively formed rules for simple and continuous present.

Based on what I had been looking for, Elyse’s lesson was an excellent example of fully exploring use and meaning of target vocabulary without allowing ancillary or related vocabulary to create a cognitive overload. Opportunities emerged from the activities to home in on precise instances in which the language is and isn’t usually used, and areas which needed clarification were swiftly highlighted. Any misunderstanding or useful meaning negotiation between SS was brought to the attention of the whole class then and there – not necessarily explicitly in a teacher-led, didactic manner, but in a way which invited other SS to comment on and intervene in the discussion taking place. This enabled T to define and explore the vocabulary in a comprehensive but also natural, communicative way.

Dialogue, and what I’ve learned:

I really enjoyed our discussion afterwards, and we covered quite a lot of ground. As has been the case in other observations I’ve been involved in, the positives noticed appear unremarkable to the observed teacher. I think this is because we don’t necessarily notice what we reliably do well, seeing it as standard practice – the only reason I picked it out was because I’m aware that succint and focused vocabulary lessons aren’t my forté. Perhaps as a result, discussion of this was mostly me explaining my difficulty in keeping productive focus on a small group of lexis – I did receive the valuable advice, though, to not just keep adding words or phrases that happen to collocate or be related.

We had an interesting chat about monitoring, concerning the mill drill. I explained that normally I set up free speaking activities, then monitor the whole class without getting involved. Elyse told me that she usually uses closer monitoring of individual pairs, and intervenes and takes part in conversations, like she did during the lesson. We explored our reasons for this and error correction was one; I almost always leave errors for class feedback and delayed error correction in groups, for after activities or even later dates. If it’s an early practice of a language point, I will intervene on the spot more often to keep things on track, but if it’s a chance for freer use and personalisation I see it as an opportunity to take in the “performance” and interaction of the whole class. This can highlight which problems with language – pronunciation, or misunderstanding of meaning, for example – are commonly occuring, and which are occuring in individuals. This makes error correction more targeted and creates the chance for mutually beneficial group work on common errors. Elyse preferred to interact with individuals, providing interaction with a native speaker, perhaps more “natural” conversation, and a chance for the teacher to continue discussing meaning with students.

This relates to a ‘macro vs micro’ thought I’ve had recently. Actually, it might have been because of this conversation. I prefer to teach a whole class as much as possible, and useful in-class interactions with individual students are always brought out to the wider class as soon as appropriate (Underhill’s ideas about teaching “one-to-one within the class” are relevant here). I like to avoid becoming focused for any period of time on one part of the class, because I feel like I’m missing out on the processes of the other learners, and possibly missing chances to help them at crucial points in their learning. Other teachers, I’ve noticed, are happy to work on a more ‘micro’ level – pairing up with a student to facilitate an activity is something which has recently caught my attention in connection with this, when watching colleagues teach. I haven’t ever seen this as a possibility for any sustained activity, because it either absents me from the rest of the class or partially absents me from the student I’m paired with; instead, I’d rejig the numbers slightly, or if it absolutely demanded an even number of students, maybe even drop the activity. The thing is that, other than what I’ve said here, I’m unsure why I believe this. The conclusion so far is that I value error correction which can upgrade the whole class’ language, and a ‘macro’ view of a class when they’re producing is useful for this. Another is that I don’t want to miss opportunities that do arise to upgrade an individual’s language, and then open this up to the whole class as a sort of shared learning experience.

I’ll try a more ‘micro’ approach to my next mill drill and test this out. Otherwise, I’ve learned some useful techniques for developing vocabulary skills without overloading students. It does seem though that in this regard, the most important take-away point is to stay focused on the target language, and divert my energy into finding communicative situations in which meaning can be negotiated, examples can be provided, and trial and error can take place with use – and also, although it now seems blindingly obvious, just resist the urge to keep thowing words into the mix.

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