Peer observation 3

The second lesson I observed which I felt formed a part of this reflective process took place a month ago, on the 24th of January. I was observing Irene teaching my second morning class at Eurocentres, whom I teach for six hours every week. Unsurprisingly, the unusual opportunity to see a teacher who I hadn’t previously ever worked with teaching a class which I also teach was very productive reflectively. It added depth to some of the comparisons we were able to make between our own teaching philosophies and practice; the context was as similar as possible, and I have dealt with the same context personally. This threw our differences in approach into relief. The class is B2-C1, with majority Arabic speakers, one Brazilian and one Swiss-French student. The lesson was skills-based, centred on reading a description of an event and then describing the event in detail. The language focus, narrative tenses, was a secondary aim. The primary aim was mediation-based, as outlined above, and was described to the students by Irene as ‘telling stories’. My observation focus was Irene’s instructions, and how she set up tasks, as this had emerged from Peer Observation 2 as an area I could benefit from concentrating on.

Another element of teaching we had discussed was classroom management. One of the students, A, struggles to remain engaged and finds it difficult to make himself concentrate. He regularly fails to listen to instructions or input from other students or from the teacher, meaning he regularly needs to be told something at least twice, also either by other students or the teacher. He gets bored very quickly, and when he does he often needs to become the focus of attention – this is actually, I think, irritating the other students in the class more than it does me. During Elyse and I’s discussion of our observations, I clarified my definition – both to her and to myself – of what constitutes disruptive behaviour that should be controlled. As I outline in Peer Observation 2, if a student’s behaviour is becoming a negative affective factor on other students in the class, thereby interefering with their opportunities for learning, I view it as a problem that should be addressed. This is why I see A’s behaviour as officially “disruptive”. (N.B: since this observation took place, A’s levels of engagement in class have improved significantly). Irene and I had agreed that this would also be a focus for both of us for this observation.

The lesson started with a successful “top-down” pre-reading activity, (which we had discussed in week 10 of the Methodologies module last term), SS answering the question ‘Do you prefer listening to or telling stories?’.

We later agreed that we favour this approach to activating schema, as it allows SS to access their own topic knowledge and any applicable general knowledge, but also produces examples for the teacher of SS awareness of the subject area, their attitude towards it and their levels of engagement with it. This can usefully inform a teacher about how to adapt or conduct the main activity – although in this instance, as I knew the class well, it wouldn’t have served that purpose to the same extent if I had been teaching. Thinking about this reminded me that analysing all of the reasons why we believe something is beneficial, not just doing it out of habit or vague instinct, is absolutely necessary if we want to apply the right methods to the right situations.

The main task, a split reading, was set up succintly. Instruction-checking questions were used on some of the instructions. SS were to read their texts, and note down up to ten words to help them remember the description of an event it gave, before explaining the content of their text to a partner who’d read a different one. A began asking T seemingly unrelated questions about varying uses for the same lexis. T avoided going into an explanation and told A to focus on the task.

When discussing the lesson later, this was a point which we both got quite a lot out of; I certainly had cause to reflect, and I feel my approach to classroom management has developed as a result. My approach to disruptive behaviour has been to neutralise it’s effect on other SS, as an immediate priority. My aim during the class is usually a short-term one. I usually either attempt to ensure that the behaviour doesn’t continue in the lesson, or that it doesn’t prove to be disruptive for anyone other than the student in question. It’s a sort of glossing-over strategy, to avoid further disruption to the class while it’s taking place. To address disruptive behaviour in the long term, I usually talk to the students concerned during the weekly one-to-one tutorials which are in place at my current school. When teaching at institutions where these one-to-ones weren’t formally scheduled, I took students aside after or before classes and discussed it with them then, encouraging them to think explicitly about what impact their behaviour had on other students – and themselves, which frankly is usually of less concern to me, assuming they’re adults – and how they can improve this.

I explained this to Irene, and described to her how I had perceived her approach: When trying to minimise A’ disruption in class, instead of ‘appeasing’ him quickly for a quiet life (as I tend to do), she encouraged him to “concentrate”, to “think more deeply about it”, or to “believe what you feel” instead of seeking to direct the focus of the class onto himself by pursuing unconstructive lines of questioning. In this, I saw an intention to develop his long-term classroom attitude through in-class classroom management, as opposed to leaving this to one-to-one conversations. It seemed like Irene was consciously applying effort to corrective training for A during the tasks. In fact she was doing this even when he wasn’t acting as a negatively affective factor on other SS. I would do this to help SS work on their learner skills, such as developing strategies for finding the meaning of new lexis, or strategies for developing communicative competencies – why should I not do this to improve learners’ attitudes in class as well? It requires a little more investment from me in classroom management, and a willingness to treat disruptive behaviour as an attitude to improve as opposed to a problem to stifle. The efforts I made to improve disruptive behaviour were explicit and infrequent instructions. Irene’s method, she agreed, is a continual application of guidance and, to an extent, learner training in class. I have since started to implement this. It’s not a habit yet, but hopefully it soon will be.

Five minutes after SS had begun the split reading task, it became apparent via SS questions that most had misunderstood the task, and were constructing their own story, noting down ten words as a structure for it. In fact, all SS but one had interpreted the task this way. Irene cleared this up, clarifying her instructions. SS then paired off and described the stories they had read.

As our intended focus for this observation was giving instructions and setting up tasks, this was weirdly quite fortunate – thankfully Irene saw it that way too! I had thought she’d set up the task perfectly clearly and was surprised to see that most SS hadn’t understood accurately, especially since she had used ICQs. The takeaway from this, which gave us some fairly nutritious food for thought, was that we shouldn’t assume that students understand instructions by default. This class are a high level, and this can lead to lack of attention from teachers to giving instructions because their language skills and knowledge mean you can be less than perfectly clear and still set up tasks successfully. Irene even used ICQs – but, crucially, they were not focused on the instructions that were the essence of the task. I wrote them down actually, and they were focused on details – for example, “How many words can you note down?”, “How many minutes do you have?” – which Irene and I, on closer examination, realised is only effective as a means of checking whether SS are listening or not. They were listening, they just hadn’t grasped the core of the task, which was relaying information. Based on this, it appears that an excellent way to improve the reliability of instructions is to prepare ICQs that dissect the nature and purpose of the task itself. An example would be, ‘Why are we reading this text?’, or perhaps ‘What are we going to do after this?’. It was a real piece of luck for both of us that an instructions-giving problem actually arose in the class, and that we had put ourselves in a position to immediately take advantage of the developmental opportunities that came out of it.

A possible extension to the main task which we discussed was, after SS had relayed their text to a partner, to then put SS in new pairs, asking them to explain the story they had heard, but not read, to a new partner. This would have developed the mediation-based aim of passing on complex information, by adding a new type of input, spoken language, for SS to relay the key information from. In the event, this was done via open-class feedback, with Irene eliciting the key information from all SS. This worked fine to check for task/aim completion, although we later agreed that had the feedback been more student-centred, this could have been achieved alongside developing and consolidating the skills outlined in the lesson aims.

This point of our dialogue added to what was a growing theme in my reflections: Student-centred lessons. This has been a driving influence on most of my observations since then. Analysing the ways in which we can restructure an activity or reorganise communciation patterns – or just sit back and not intervene, as I mentioned in Peer Observation 1 – in order to increase opportunities for SS to communicate and develop self and peer-reliance has become a significant area of reflection for me.

 

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