Assessed observation 3, part 1

Another observation, another step in the reflective process. I’d been feeling quite nervous about this one, more so than the previous two, I think because I had never done this particular lesson type before with a morning class. The class was the same as for the second observation – my morning GLA B2 group – with a slightly different makeup of students. The lesson itself didn’t really use any materials, apart from the language which had been covered the hour before and the output of the learners themselves, and this made it more difficult to judge the planning of the lesson, in terms of predicting timings of stages, but also of reacting to possible student output. It was all a bit up in the air and I wasn’t entirely sure what would happen – you never are as a teacher, and that’s something I’m comfortable with (and in fact usually particularly enjoy), but in the context of an assessed observation with defined aims and outcomes it was a little less confidence-inspiring than, for example, the listening skills focus of my second observation.

The lesson, from 9.50-10.40 (11/3/19), was intended to provide meaningful use of the target language from the 9.00-9.50 session, compound nouns on the topic of social and environmental issues (acid rain, animal rights, blood sport, welfare state, etc.). The target language is attached below. This was to be achieved through learners planning and carrying out a survey based around their own selection of six of these lexical items. The questionnaires were to be made in groups, then an in-class survey carried out, before learners fed back their results into their original questionnaire-creating groups. As the final stage of this session, the questionnaires were then to be reviewed and possibly adapted, before a survey was carried out in the next lesson of people in Pavilion park and the area around the school. The ultimate end-product of the project is a written report about Brightonians’ attitudes to the learners’ chosen social and environmental issues. The full plan and target language are attached here:

Observation 3-1e3x6k7 Observation 3 TL-2499q5n

Here are the teaching aims, and learning outcomes:

Teaching aims:

1. To consolidate knowledge of compound nouns

2. To provide an opportunity for meaningful, communicative use of language for describing social and environmental issues

3. To provide an opportunity to practice collecting and passing on information about opinions and attitudes

Learning outcomes:

1. Language – SS will have made communicative, meaningful use of new vocabulary (compound nouns related to social and environment issues)

2. Skills/mediation – SS will have practiced finding out, synthesising and passing on detailed information about opinions and attitudes from a spoken source

I was fairly happy with how far the lesson met these aims; the previous session had run over a little, just to make sure that the learners had actually got a handle on the meaning and use of the target language. That was the learning outcome from that session on which everything in this session depended. I’d planned in an optional stage, of brainstorming vocabulary related to learners’ chosen compound nouns, so I dropped this as a formal stage and just used it as a fast-finishers activity. It was intended to provide language scaffolding for carrying out the survey, to help prepare students for vocabulary they might encounter when asking their questions. However, it wasn’t an essential component of the learning outcomes or lesson aims, whereas the following stages were crucial to fulfilling those. Unfortunately the final stage of the lesson was a little bit rushed – as Barbara pointed out in our immediate feedback discussion afterwards – and that was to the slight detriment of the second learning outcome, as it limited the amount of synthesis and passing on of information from the learners in that particular session.

Overall though, I felt that my learners had had ample opportunity, mostly taken advantage of, to make meaningful communicative use of the target language, and contextualise it with their own opinions and in wider language use. They also left the lesson having practiced the skills necessary for the next stage, collecting, recording and passing on key information.

Interstingly enough, my first reaction was less positive than how I feel about it now, some hours later. The first thing I said to Barbara afterwards was that I wasn’t totally happy with the lesson. I thought that it had been useful, but that I hadn’t realistically identified a specific lesson focus – lots of emergent language came up that I hadn’t given my learners scaffolding or preparation for, and which I hadn’t allowed time to fully exploit. Question forms and prepositional verbs would have been great angles to explore based on student output, but I wasn’t really able to channel the focus of the lesson towards that, as there were already enough demands on the learners and on lesson time. I know the class, so it should have been possible to foresee this.

Barbara pointed out firstly that the stages supporting the lesson aims I had set out to fulfil had been completed, and secondly that the student-orientated nature of the activities made it difficult to predict what emergent language could come up, as they weren’t working towards a very particular or specific goal.

This ties in interestingly with the first of my personal aims for this observation:

Personal aims:

1. Motivating communicative use of TL using a task-based end product

2. Providing an opportunity for real-world contextualisation of TL

3. Ensuring instruction giving and task set-up is clear, using ICQs and CCQs focused on an end product

The key take-away point for me from my longer discussion with Angela after the second assessed observation was to ensure there is a contextualised, personalised purpose to communication wherever possible. As I explained in the post from that meeting, this is as a rule my goal when teaching language – lexis or grammar. This is very much in line with, and probably a product of, CLT theories, but also borne out by my own experience of learning and teaching as an effective way of learning new language – using it meaningfully, both for you and in the context of the world around you. In this lesson though, I wanted to expand on and explore this possibility. Instead of self-contained “communicative” activities designed to stimulate meaningful exchanges of information, and provide learners with a desire and a reason to use the target language, I wanted to create a larger more over-arching motivation, for a process as opposed to just an activity. Angela and I had discussed a task-based end product as a means of achieving this. Considering the topic area of the vocabulary – chosen by the learners the week before – an opinion based survey, which required the learners to choose areas interesting to them from which to create their survey, seemed to fit the bill of contextualising, personalising, and providing an end-product based motivation for learners’ use of the target language.

What I now believe happened in the lesson, following the discussion with Barbara and a little bit of thought, is that the attention I gave in planning and teaching to maintaining this overarching motivation and focus on an end-product – “macro” CLT, you might say – distracted me from setting up the tasks with more immediate purpose for the learners. All of the language came from them, as did a great deal of the input. Barbara pointed out that one of my students came up with a couple of really relevant and helpful ideas for the process; focusing on qualitative or quantitative data from the survey, and researching their chosen social or environmental issues in detail before charging into the streets to discuss them with strangers. Had I applied more focus to creating more specific guidelines for each stage of the process, learner interaction would have been more purposeful stage by stage, as well as being generally motivated by the endeavour as a whole.

Also, this would address the issue I mentioned to Barbara of not having predicted the emergent language. Yes, this can and will be worked on retrospectively in class later this week. However, had I structured the stages a little more, I would have been better able to prepare for possible emergent language, and could have planned for relevant scaffolding and support for the learners. This would, I believe, make the series of lessons more productive in terms of communicative, meaningful language use.

What was achieved by the lack of structure was a very student-centred lesson. Creating an autonomously motivated, learner-centred classroom for a lesson was a personal aim from my last observation, which has emerged from several peer observations. It’s an element I value highly in language learning, and I have been trying to match my practice in reality to my beliefs. I’m really happy to have seen an apparently lasting effect of these efforts, as my lessons day-to-day are becoming more and more learner-centred, with me in the role of a facilitator, trying to operate Demand-High style language upgrading in response to students’ production. As always, though, this development needs to be tempered with other considerations, and re-evaluated from other angles – which there are a lot of. I’m glad that one of these angles has seemingly come out of today’s observation – providing a structured framework for student-centred lessons, within which emergent language can be more predictably dealt with, if necessary.

I was also pleased with Barbara’s comment that I had ‘taught the students, not the plan’. Whilst being overly adherent to plans is not something I’m usually accused of, something I took from the first assessed observation was my need to become more comfortable and flexible when creating and using detailed plans. Planning is an important skill which shouldn’t be dismissed, and adapting a plan to suit the needs of learners stems from having a principled, outcome based conception of your plan.

The course is coming so thick and fast that sometimes it’s not easy to put myself in the same position developmentally that I was one, or two, or three months ago. It’s reassuring to see that the conclusions, realisations and re-evaluations that have been produced by this reflective process haven’t been lost or forgotten, but are actually building onto each other to create an adapted set of beliefs and practices. I didn’t consciously focus on either of the successful areas which were relevant to my previous two assessed lessons, student-centredness and adapting a plan to learners, but the remodelling of my approach to these areas has apparently stuck.

Writing this blog has surely played a huge part in allowing me to internalise my explicit reflections. Controlled processing moves to automatic processing (I hope)! This is very motivating for continuing this method of reflection.

 

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One thought on “Assessed observation 3, part 1”

  1. This is a carefully considered post and one that feels that the process of both the course and of reflection is genuinely having a positive impact on how you think of yourself as a teacher. You’ve managed to capture the different responses from that ‘oh it wasn’t very good’ feeling at the beginning, to a more assured later response. I like the way you mapped reflection to your plan. Perhaps you could show more engagement with the video though? There was a lot of good in this lesson – students were very engaged, you demanded high of them and many delivered, the task built in personalisation as they were able to select, it promoted cooperation and peer support, it had real world relevance, your role as teacher was supportive and facilitative. I still wonder about the appropriacy of sending students out to the general public to ask questions that could, for some, be considered quite probing or personal on potentially economic, political or environmental topics. The student who identified points in the process that would help them (e.g. more time for research so they get the pitch, tone and content of their questions ‘right’ and so they have more of a background knowledge in case any participants engage them in dialogue) was right to raise these questions / concerns and, judging from what you say above, you will take this into consideration if and when you do this task again. There is also the issue of ensuring everyone is working in their groups as there was one student who seemed very distant and did not participate – we talked about this and I think you should trust your instincts to act if you notice something like this happening. However, this was an interesting, highly student-centred lesson and you should be commended for using the observation process to try out things you have never done before. Thank you for letting me observe you – and for your thoughts above. I hope you continue to use the course as a developmental process as I genuinely believe it carries the most impact that way.

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