Peer observation 4

The 28th of January is now six weeks ago; I wish I’d had the time to create a post about this peer observation nearer to the time, when everything I discussed with Laura, who came to observe my morning B2 class, was still fresh in my mind. I do, however, believe that the passage of time has served to develop what I learned from the lesson and the discussion afterwards. The way that issues which arose from it have interacted with other areas of reflective interest and other angles of self-evaluation have made it far more meaningful to me now that it was at the time. What I should have done, as we were advised to do and as I have done with my assessed observations, is write an immediate reaction to it, and then approach it again in this more measured, holistic sense later on. That would have made it possible to take full advantage of longer-term gestation of ideas, as well as to record in detail my attitude towards the lesson and feedback at the time, putting the development of the reflection into context.

The lesson itself was based on practicing and using vocabulary to describe clothes and appearance, followed by a short quiz about learners’ attitudes to fashion and style, and a short reading about a dress worn by Bjork, adapted from a newspaper article. The latter was taken from Instant Discussions, and the lexis and the quiz were taken from English File 3rd Edition, upper intermediate. The focus of the reading was interpreting key details from the text, and the purpose of the quiz was to provide meaningful use of the vocabulary, and more opportunities for personalisation. The class were a solid B2 level at the time, with around half of the students as Arabic speakers, two Europeans, and one Colombian student. I’d asked Laura to look at my language grading, as this was an area for investigation that had been raised in previous peer observations, and we had both decided that the role of learner autonomy in the lesson would be a productive focus, as we’d both recently been researching that area for an essay and reflecting on its presence in our teaching.

In the lesson, we started with an open-class hotseat warmer, then moved on to pair work. Students had a minute or two to go over their notes, then tested each other on the clothes and appearance vocabulary we had learned in the previous lesson. Then they described people in the room for their partner to guess. T was monitoring for interesting emergent vocabulary and language, and to record anything that needed to be revisited – meaning and use of similar adjectives or nouns, clarification, pronunciation and so on. This was fed back to the class in an open discussion for smaller clarifications, and on the WB for students to analyse or correct in groups for pronunciation focus, or more fundamental language use. Learners were encouraged to look at the phonemes accompanying their vocabulary lists to help them with pronunciation, and reminded that these are usually in dictionaries too, before T elicited answers or modelled and drilled. We did the fashion and style quiz individually at first, then learners interviewed each other in small groups, before being regrouped to pass on information about what the interviewees had said about their attitudes towards it, and their reasons for this. The class feedback that followed was geared towards T eliciting for the attention of the class any interesting language that students had used in their descriptions of themselves and others. The reading was the last stage – learners skim-read to choose the best title for the article, then read again to answer some tricky true/false questions, focusing on detailed information or detailed opinions of the author. They read individually, but checked in pairs before expanding into small groups to justify their answers after each stage.

I felt like the lesson had been quite positive in terms of fostering learner autonomy, developing the students’ self-reliance and learner skills. To be honest, the language grading didnt really come up in this lesson, partly as a result of the learners’ level but aso because of the general simplicity of the tasks, and their familiarity with the task types. You could say it was successful, but looking back it maybe wasn’t an appropriate focus for this lesson, even though it had been in previous observations. I’d asked Laura to look out for it because of its relevance in other observations, but I could definitely have asked her to evaluate a more relevant area of my teaching for this one if I’d thought more about the demands on the learners in this lesson, and less about my own areas of focus in other lessons.

We did talk about graded language in our discussion afterwards, though. Laura’s attitude to the feedback process was really great, I thought, which might be linked to her role being managerial as well as academic. Either way, she was positive and encouraging, but not in a way that removed the substance from what she was asking about or observing. I remember how excited I was about peer observations in my first post on it (“More Peer Observations, please!”) and this has only been reinforced over time. Learning to strike a balance between an open, positive atmosphere and a discussion that could inspire some genuine reflection and re-thinking doesn’t sound like the easiest thing, but it’s been really encouraging to see that it’s been possible with everyone I’ve worked with in this process. I stand by what I said; there’s no reason for teachers to fear peer observations, and more institutions should implement them more frequently.

Back to graded language though. Laura and I talked about how much we should worry about it. When giving instructions, it’s crucial that learners understand what they should do so that they feel confident, but also just to ensure the activity takes shape the way you want it to. In that instance, language grading is clearly important, and planning it and supporting it with ICQs and CCQs is justified and desirable, if it could present difficulties for learners. As for other teacher language in the classroom though – maybe a reaction to something a learner has said, a natural comment on something that happens, or in a mixed level class, an interaction with a more able learner which less proficient users of English may not understand – how important is language grading? In an elementary class, unless the teacher speaks very rarely, the majority of teacher language will be outside of the learners’ L+1. Despite this, it could be argued that the challenge presented might increase students receptive skills, in terms of pragmatics and contextualisation. Exposure to the patterns and rhythms of speech is positive in general, in my opinion. Also, although being presented with a text that is far too difficult for learners is not the best way for them to analyse English and build up their interlanguage, I believe that interpreting meaning using body language or other non-verbal communication, the social or linguistic context of interaction, and pragmatic receptive skills, is useful for learners. I haven’t really explored this at all, its more of an unexamined belief. Laura thought along similar lines, but neither of us had ever investigated it. I should look into what others have written or said on the topic.

Something we talked about that hadn’t been a pre-determined focus for the observation was classroom management. This actually had come up in previous observations too. This is a point at which I’m both glad that I’m looking back at several reflective dialogues from several lessons at the same time, and regretful that I hadn’t followed up on their conclusions closer to the time. A visible connection in the consequences of an attitude of mine has come out from the amalgamated reflections of several peer observations. However, perhaps if I’d analysed it more immediately, I could have noticed it sooner and reacted to it in this lesson. There’s still time though!

What Laura mentioned was the use of phones by my learners. In many lessons I encourage them to use online dictionaries on their phones, and in this one also I highlighted that they could find the phonemic script for new or known words, or an audio model of them, on their phones. Many of them do just use their phones anyway when they’ve finished an activity, unless I actively give them something else to do, and this is where classroom management comes in. As explained in previous posts, if learners choose to do this and I feel it doesn’t affect the learning experience of others, I tend not to prioritise intervening – I’m not their boss, they are, and it’s their job to take responsibility for their learning. Laura asked me about this too, and our discussion went more in the direction of lesson aims. She asked if I would ever prohibit this, and I realised that I often had with lower level classes if it started to interfere with learners achieving their aims and learning outcomes for the lesson. It’s not necessarily about level, but if the cognitive demands on the learners are such that their full processing power needs to be at their disposal all the time, then I wouldn’t allow them to disengage like this. This often does apply to lower level classes, because there’s a higher chance that students will struggle to follow, miss a key opportunity, or miss a teaching point I feel they need if they are not constantly applying themselves. I used to have a “phone box” in some classes because I felt that learners wouldn’t achieve what I expected of them otherwise. This was a foundation for my attitudes and practices with mobile phone use that I had never noticed before, which this discussion brought to my attention.

I now see that it bears relevance to my wider attitude to classroom management, also revealed to me for the first time in the discussion after a peer observation – Peer Observation 3, with Irene. We spoke about her long-term, learner-training-esque approach to managing a student’s disruptive behaviour. In contrast with my short-term approach to it of ensuring lesson aims are not interfered with and the learners can all get good outcomes from the lesson, Irene combined this with an effort to change the actual attitude of the disruptive learner, which would both improve their learning opportunities in the future, and build a more productive classroom culture. My practices concerning phone use, as detailed above, are symptomatic of my angle on classroom management compared to Irene’s. If I extended my focus from just maintaining a successful class in terms of learning outcomes to developing my learners’ attitudes towards mobile phone use, I would actually be building their autonomous learner skills in an extra dimension. As well as equipping them for autonomous learning, and providing opportunities to do so, I could attempt to develop their attitudes towards disengaging in class. I could highlight the extra opportunities beyond the lesson aims that they could take advantage of instead of checking Instagram. I don’t want to ban phones unless its necessary, but I could build a culture focussing on exploiting those moments.

In a sense, then, Laura’s point here was very pertinent to the overall question of helping students to become successful autonomous learners. Another more explicitly connected point she raised was the layout of my classroom. There were nine learners, and I organised them into groups of three, mixing them up between activities. The tables were in a horseshoe pattern, and I was floating around in the middle or behind. Laura suggested using ‘islands’, or a café-style table arrangement instead, to make the most of having those small groups. This, she pointed out, would perhaps have encouraged more reliance on other students in their groups and less on me, creating more student-centred interaction patterns. It’s taken me a while, but finally I’ve started doing this in class, after this issue came up once or twice more in my reflections; sometimes it takes me a few attempts to put a good idea into my arsenal of standard practice. In my second assessed observation I used islands to implicitly discourage the learners from reverting straight to me as an option, and to compound their sense of self-reliance, and collaboration with a small group of peers.

We also discussed some positive things which Laura had noticed, and wanted to find out more about. She picked up on the built-in recycling of vocabulary throughout the lesson, excluding perhaps the last task (reading). Elyse also mentioned the way in which the lesson she observed was structured to re-use and recycle target language. I’ve always held this to be very important, and in fact necessary, for successful learning – and hopefully correct automatisation – of a language point, be it grammar or lexis. It should happen fractally; within an activity, within a lesson, within a week and within a course. For example, in the first review activity, learners recycled the vocabulary three times (schemata had already been activated during the warmer). They had two minutes of silent time to review their notes, to focus on recall. Then they tested each other, to focus on recall, production and meaning. Then they described people in the room, to focus on all of this, but centrally on meaningful communicative use. This was about ten or fifteen minutes. The same pattern was inside the quiz activity, and that stage as a whole recycled the language used in – and the language which emerged from – the first stage of the lesson. Opportunities for freer use of the language were provided when discussing the reading. In two other lessons that week, learners were presented with opportunities for recall, focus on production, and focus on meaningful use of the language we used in this lesson.

This course has helped me to examine this habit, and provide a rationale for it, which in turns allows me to apply it to greater effect with my learners. In an essay I wrote last year on the possibilities of remodelling stabilising language items before they become fossilised, I emphasised the importance of repeated application of controlled processing, in an environment where peer corrections, teacher corrections or remodelling can take place, in order for language items to avoid becoming fossilised as non-target like forms. If learners are to internalise new language, I think this is necessary. I found that the idea of ‘3XP’ from ‘Demand High’ theories (https://demandhighelt.wordpress.com), essentially ensuring language or material is fully exploited through repetition via different formats and activities, links in well with this overall concept.