Assessed observation 2, part 2

In the build-up to my second observed lesson, and in the aftermath, my main focus was steadying the ship. The first had been a pass but not satisfactory to me, although it provided some excellent angles for reflection and avenues for development. The second was, as I mentioned in the “hot-take” post last week, partly geared towards correcting the mistakes of the first, and revisiting the areas which had been exposed to me as poorly managed – timing, aims, and learning outcomes, mainly. Frankly, I was concerned with performing as well as possible in this module for the sake of the course, but mostly my motivation was working on my personal aims, as detailed in the plan and the first post on this observation. As I said in that post, I felt I had achieved those aims to an extent. I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion and feedback today with Angela, as it helped me to set a course to continue developing these areas – whilst she agreed that my aims were successful, she had a few insights which opened up new possibilities for me to explore.

In the past week I’ve been thinking about possible adaptations of or additions to the lesson which could have improved it, or added a useful dimension to it which was missing, trying to anticipate what Angela would say. Something which occurred to me was to include some dedicated time for personalisation via a speaking activity at the end of the lesson when the planned procedure concluded earlier than expected, instead of consolidating the skills with a second listening task. I could have invited the students, as I did as part of the following lesson, to describe their own reactions both to listening and to the titular question ‘Why do we listen to music?’, and explain whether it related to their own experiences with music – if there’s anything they would add, anything they hadn’t thought of before, or anything which they really connected with. This was based more on a hunch than anything; in a language-focused lesson, I’d say that personalised interaction using the language in question is necessary, to provide meaningful, communicative use of the language for a purpose, giving learners context and application within which to frame the language. Personalising language is part of building it into your own interlanguage; seeing how it pertains to you, your needs and your experiences. In a receptive skills-based lesson though, a reason for personalisation, other than to make the lesson more engaging, didn’t spring to mind.

When I explained this to Angela, she agreed that I could have usefully included more opportunities for personal communication about the listening topic. Crucially, she added a rationale for doing so, which we had in fact discussed during the Methodologies and Approaches module in Week 10, but I’d since forgotten about. She pointed out that personalised speaking tasks could have contextualised the listening aims more. My contextualisation was explicit: we’re doing this because not taking is an important skill for your future academic careers. However, when we listen, we listen for a purpose – a reason that we want to understand, some motivation for gaining something by decoding input. Perhaps we want to talk, or complete a task, or get to know somebody. Personalisation, maybe spaced between listening and note-synthesising stages, would have made the listening more realistic, giving learners more of a motivation to cognitively engage with what they were hearing. The purpose of making and sharing notes was effective enough, but not a particularly inspiring one. Skills are not isolated, I was reminded, and contextualising the listening through personal responses and reactions could have improved learners’ investment in the learning aims. Some personalisation did happen; I asked students for a reaction to something which they had gained from the listening, or if they had an example of an idea being presented from their own lives, and they reacted well. Building this in “officially” would have been valuable.

In relation to this, we discussed ways of creating a stronger purpose for listening, the enhance the authenticity of the skills practice. The personalisation of the topic would have created an information gap that learners, according to CLT (and also in my opinion and experience), would be motivated to bridge through communication – explaining their own feelings and experiences about the topic at hand. The topic content was quite fertile for this, connecting music, psychology and emotional reactions. Another suggestion Angela made was setting a collaborative end product of the taking and sharing of notes; instead of there being an information gap based only on what information different learners had taken from the listening text, there could have been a task-based element, learners working collaboratively to produce something using this information. They could have made a presentation about the relationship between the psychologist’s lecture and their own attitudes and experiences, in a later lesson.

Both of these techniques to add further purpose to the listening and note-taking tasks would have complemented and supported the listening aims, and probably improved learning outcomes in that way. However, I believe they would also have developed another of the learning outcomes of that lesson, which was collaborative mediation to synthesise information. The class I teach, and was teaching at the time, are very able both linguistically and cognitively but can be reticent in communicating their ideas and thoughts. They are comfortable with doing so and don’t hold back when encouraged, but they do often need encouragement. Realistically, the presence of a camera in the room in that lesson didn’t help. They did collaborate and they did synthesise their notes, but it took some persistent encouragement from me, at first, to make sure they were doing this. The learning outcome was achieved, and they did, I feel, display a raised awareness of the benefits and advantages of collaborative note-taking during the second listening activity. It would have been developed further, though, if I had really exploited the possibilities of a purpose for their collaboration. The natural information gap of personalisation, and the task-based motivation of a collaborative end product, would both have been suitable ways of doing this, but I overlooked them.

I think I played it safe in this one to be honest, as the early completion of the procedure showed. I’m happy with how my personal aims and the aims of the lesson were addressed, but in equal measure I’m eager to use this feedback to extend my ambitions with learning outcomes – not necessarily adding new ones, but exploring ways of supporting and building on the development of existing ones for a lesson. Adding motivating elements to receptive tasks, such a collaborative targets or discovering one’s own and others’ personal responses, seems a good direction to go in. A vast number of techniques and activities could fall within a task-based method, relevant to almost any receptive skill – presentations, peer teaching, reports, models, plans, sculptures, videos, social media posts/comments. I aim to include collaborative end-products like this whenever possible to increase the cognitive engagement of learners in the receptive skill in question, by adding some contextualisation or purpose, as there is in real life when we use these skills. Personalising content is not a new addition to my teaching, and I do this wherever possible. As mentioned above, thought, I only had explicit awareness of why I would do this in a language-focused lesson, dealing with lexis or grammar; I didn’t have anything but a general unexamined belief concerning personalising content in receptive skills lessons. I’m glad to have adapted this attitude and to inform it a little more.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *