This peer observation was an interesting one. My colleague R agreed to let me watch her teach and what is interesting is that she is nearing the end of both a DipTESOL and a DipEd. This was perhaps the most surprising observation so far, as I could draw many similarities and influences from the diploma course.

The class R taught was an intermediate of mixed nationalities and ages (from 18 – 55). The focus of her lesson was on communicative skills as well as the use of action and state verbs and their use with present continuous.

With my colleague J, I focused on areas for improvement and with K I paid close attention to differing approaches to teaching. This time I have chosen to take a more in depth look at the similarities in teaching styles and the ways she has utilised the skills learned from her diploma, while highlighting some areas for development where they have some correlation to my own experience.

Demand high
R used a lot of demand high techniques in order to stretch her activities and make the most of them. I noted she too uses prediction before listening tasks rather than just rolling straight into playing the audio and was happy to see others do this. She also had a great idea to extend a mingle, in which the students had seven questions and had to speak to seven different people. It’s so simple but effective and it prevented students from wandering around during a mingle. Not only that but she made sure all students had an opportunity to read questions aloud in class, allowing them to practise pronunciation.

The class were also well-versed in meta language and knew how to look for synonyms, antonyms and word classes, which was particularly impressive. This was culminated at the end of the class by each student adding one word to a paper word-bank, giving a synonym, an antonym and a definition/example sentence for each one, presumably for future revision in class. This is something I have utilised to great effect on a one-to-one basis, so it will be interesting to try to expand this on a classroom-wide scale. I it interesting that in my previous observation with K, there was no use of meta-language, whereas R has almost completed her Diploma and really pushes students to expand their language. What is even more interesting is that both teachers have roughly the same amount of experience, however K is at the very beginning of her diploma, whereas R is nearing the end.

Props and materials

I must admit I haven’t used props much since my NQT days, but I forget how useful they can be. Simply by throwing a ball to students for the answers, she focused the attention on the student answering and stopped small conversations from breaking out.

Her materials were limited but those she did use were in colour and the difference in switching from B&W is noticeable, the students really engage with the handouts. I have recently begun to laminate some of my more effective materials but really need to look into using more colour, it is so surprising how much colour can change a student’s attitude to using materials.

 

Focus areas (requested by R)

Interestingly, despite all of the opportunities for speech and conversation, R did not correct the students’ pronunciation much at all, in fact I counted only one occasion in 90 minutes where this happened, and this was a communicative lesson. This probably had some connection with her main focus area, which was instruction delivery. R had told me that sometimes her students don’t understand her instructions, which I thought peculiar considering her years of experience and her level of expertise. It turns out the root of this issue was the same reason that she didn’t correct students much. I think R is naturally a very polite person and this is reflected in her teaching. A lot of her instructions were quite ‘wordy’ and used social distance in her own grammar in order to be polite. She used phrases and words such as ‘if/would/”Are you OK with…?/maybe/”Why don’t you…”. In the lesson I noticed

During our feedback session I highlighted these examples to her and she did recognise that this was something she working on. I had a similar problem a few years ago and through reflection and practise, I narrow down my basic commands to no more than three/four words, using intonation to emphasise those words in longer utterances. By stripping away all of the ‘niceties’ from common conversation, you aren’t necessarily being rude, you are fine-tuning your communication in order to convey your instructions clearly and effectively.

Interestingly, both one official observer and a former student have recently described me as ‘strict but in a good way’. I was unaware I was making such an impression in the classroom and I believe this might be down to my use of commands in the class; I’m never rude or disrespectful, I merely convey my instructions directly and use a lot of gestures in place of some words, which also has the added benefit of reduction teacher talking time. Having shared this with R, she herself is looking at implementing shorter commands in order to be understood more frequently by a larger majority of her students.

All in all, this was a great opportunity to observe someone at the end of their diploma and to note down the similarities in teaching styles. It was also nice to be able to give something back to this particular colleague in order to aid her own professional development, and that’s what is crucial about reflective