Monthly Archives: May 2020

Conclusions

Posted on by
1

I’ve come to the end of the TESOL Diploma course now and what a year it has been. I never thought I’d be spending the last two months of the course in lockdown because of a global pandemic, but it seems the 21st century keeps throwing curveballs at mankind!

When I began the course, I wrote about a ‘knowledge gap’ to bridge. It’s important to keep learning in any profession but particularly in teaching and I have learnt a lot over the past nine months. It’s particularly satisfying to rekindle my joy of learning for its own sake, as that is probably the greatest pleasure of education.

The module in Language Awareness with Simon Wilkinson helped to cement my linguistic knowledge and covered some areas that I knew very little about, especially analysis at clause and phrase level, as well as a better knowledge of phonetics.

The methodology module was probably my favourite module of this course. I particularly enjoyed Paul Slater’s classes and really enjoyed grappling with different perspectives on teaching and the discussions these prompted in class. Studying alongside a lot of very passionate teachers has been a highlight. Teachers such as Jack, Adam, Nico, Jo, Jane, Rossa and others have all inspired me in different ways.

It has been very useful in the module assessments to investigate more deeply the issues that Arabic learners have in ESL. These students make up the bulk of my classes at present and I have feel I have gained a broader and deeper knowledge of the challenges they face as a result of my research for the methodology and second language acquisition modules.

I said in my opening statement that I considered my strengths to be an ability to entertain and activate classes but I realise that is me on a good day, not every day. It was quite a chastening experience to video myself on a bad day when students had not done their homework and there were discipline issues in class. We can’t be balls of energy all the time but this uncomfortable truth prompted me to evaluate the effort I was putting in to activating classes, and I was pleased with the results in following classes.

I have grown in confidence as a specialist in writing and EAP through this year. I was particularly pleased with my second teaching observation in which I focused on teaching paragraphs and counter arguments. I felt in full flow in that class and in my element. However, it has also been positive to gain a better understanding of other areas of ESL. I feel I have a more solid knowledge of teaching vocabulary. I recall in particular the peer observation of a colleague at the college, which I considered a model lesson in teaching and developing vocabulary usage.

The materials module has been particularly interesting. As a writer and author I’ve always had an interest in writing materials and have developed some of my own over the years. This module and the lesson observations enabled me to take a far more critical view of both textbooks and when, how and why to supplement and modify them. I am particularly interested in materials that help to scaffold knowledge. I’m also mindful that I have used too many materials in one class on occasion. I recall an observation by my manager over a year ago when I gave students no less than six handouts! The observation of my colleague teaching vocabulary was particularly eye-opening because he used just one handout and built on it over the course of an hour. Doing more with less is a solid teaching principle in my view.

I want to continue to challenge myself to improve in areas I am less strong. I know I can teach higher levels well and I know I’m strong at writing, study skills and communication skills. I’m less experienced in recent years with intermediate levels and below and it’s been good to rediscover the value of all those nuts and bolts that I learnt in my CELTA many years ago: eliciting, drilling, checking for understanding and in particular, knowing when to correct. I am aware of my tendency to over-correct and also my tendency to overload students and move too fast. Being aware of your own shortcomings is important and a first step to working on them.

An issue for me on this course has been that I strongly dislike being observed. I have discovered though that I mind far less when I know the person well, and felt far less nervous for peer observations than assessed course observations. It’s unfortunate that I often don’t show the real me in lesson observations because I feel a need to stick to a lesson plan and not improvise. This improvisation is a strength of my teaching but I haven’t shown it much in observations. In a class immediately after an observation I did a lot of improvisation including a spontaneous introduction of teaching and drilling pronunciation pairs when a student had trouble distinguishing between ‘want’ and ‘won’t’. This kind of spontaneity would be less likely to happen in lesson observations. There’s little I can do about that, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be documented in an assessment for me to know what works and what doesn’t. I can reflect on that myself.

I acknowledged in my opening statement that taking on this course would be a big challenge alongside two jobs at university and being a single parent of two children. It has proved to be challenging but until the Covid 19 crisis, I felt I was balancing things quite well. My tutors gave me some flexibility and I kept my schedule clear enough to do the necessary work. The biggest challenge has come since lockdown happened and I found myself struggling with getting to grips with teaching online in the middle of a pandemic with my children at home and all the demands of home life. This definitely affected the quality of my final two teaching observations. It’s a little unfair to have to tackle mastery of online teaching from a standing start while being assessed, but we live in unprecedented times that nobody could have foreseen. I can be quite hard on myself with high expectations so I need to take a step back and appreciate that I’ve done well to do the course full-time in far from ideal circumstances.

Overall, considering the current situation, I am pleased with a merit in my lesson observations. Two out of four classes went very well and the other two were strong passes. I feel I could have aimed higher if lockdown had not happened with all the accompanying stress and upheaval. I probably would have submitted a fifth lesson, but it can’t be helped. 65% was my target grade for teaching practice and I was pleased to achieve this more than once.

One of the most eye-opening pieces of feedback I have received on the course was following my second lesson observation, which went well overall. My tutor Paul mentioned that I was working very hard, perhaps too hard, and I should get my students working harder.

That was a lightbulb moment for me. I have been university lecturing for a long time and I have a tendency to take over proceedings. Especially when I’m being observed I’m putting in a lot of effort in classes. This is all very well but am I sometimes working very hard and not demanding or allowing the students to work as hard as they can? After all, it’s the students who need to be working. I am teaching them but the main aim is to facilitate learning.

I realise that, being schooled in the communicative approach, I place a lot of emphasis at times on the class being interactive, busy and full of life, when there is a crucial place at university level for students getting their heads down and doing the work – planning speeches, studying long texts, researching and drafting essays. I also realise that a cornerstone of the communicative approach is to reduce Teacher Talking Time (TTT), so I need to keep an eye on that in particular.

Now I am teaching online, I’m particularly aware of how hard I’m working and my enjoyment levels  dropped initially. I’m starting to bounce back now I realise I need to get my students working harder, both for my own wellbeing, but especially because that is what they need to do. So the conclusion on this point is: less TTT from me, and more facilitating. This could be the most important of my transformative reflections.

I finish the course grateful to have learnt a lot but also keen to learn more. That’s the way it should be.

 

Teaching observation 4

Posted on by
1

For my fourth teaching observation, I decided not to use a textbook, partly as most of my previous observations had used textbooks, and partly because this gave me greater freedom to tailor the class to specific needs.

My current online class is a lower level than my previous classes. The three students have IELTS ranging 4-5 with an average of 4.5. UBIC accepts students lower than IELTS level 5 to spend 6-12 months boosting their English before doing a further 6 months of English for Academic Purposes either at Foundation or pre-Masters level.

I have recently taken on 5 hours per week teaching this group Speaking and Listening and a further 3 hours doing study skills. Other teachers have classes focusing on reading, writing and grammar. Two of the students Khosbayar (known as Hoso) and Omar are pre-Masters students in lockdown in the UK (in Brighton and London respectively). They are in their mid 20s. Zaid is joining class from his home in the UAE. He is 18. Hoso is going to study a masters in business, Omar will study a masters in tourism management and Zaid a bachelors in business management.

All students are around the same level, although Hoso’s speaking is a little weaker and writing a little stronger than the two Arabic students. They are a very nice, small group of students. Hoso and Omar are very career-minded and dedicated while Zaid has a more laidback attitude. He naturally has a slightly higher level of English than the others but his commitment and motivation are sometimes an issue. He often has a poor internet connection, logs on at least half an hour late and usually has to disconnect and reconnect several times during class. I had anticipated this.

The class I delivered was focused around speaking and listening on the theme of jobs. I originally planned to discuss their own previous jobs at the beginning of the class but we did this in a casual conversation in the previous class so we moved straight on to the activation, looking at images of different jobs and discussing what different people do (e.g. ‘a doctor helps people to feel better’). On reflection a quick conversation about their own jobs would still have helped to activate them into the topic.

I encountered the first technical glitch at this point because Omar could not see the shared resource very well. This is a slightly perplexing problem that he encounters from time to time and it usually resolves itself, as it did on this occasion. I managed to draw out some discussion from the students before moving onto the first worksheet.

I find I am still getting to grips with sharing different documents through Zoom and initially stumbled here by moving to the wrong task (the listening) before the worksheet – even though I had my plan in front of me! Even after teaching for years I still get flustered and stressed during teaching observations, even online.

The first worksheet which contained a discussion of different stages of a job application seemed to go quite well. I have started using the technique of writing directly onto worksheets or slides online rather than using the whiteboard because I find it is easier than jumping between windows.

When we moved onto the listening comprehension, I knew that the students would need two listens. They generally did quite well although Hoso often answered ‘false’ because she was looking for the same language rather than same meaning, so I clarified this. On reflection, it would be best to clarify at the beginning of the task.

There was quite a lot of vocabulary that was new to the students – ‘advert’, ‘paperwork’, ‘qualifications’, ‘qualities’, and I tried to elicit and explain meanings as much as possible, particularly when vocabulary was key to understanding the tasks. When we moved on to preparing for the job interview, it was clear that they needed quite a lot of vocabulary. I think I would supplement a future class with some more useful vocabulary, especially on personal qualities. We discussed this and I elicited and wrote some ideas but there could have been more vocabulary preparation.

We then moved onto doing the scrambled sentences exercise with useful expressions and questions for  a job interview. This was intended as further preparation by giving them some ideas of the types of phrases and questions used in a job interview, and this seemed to work well.

When moving onto the preparation for the interview, Zaid finally joined the class after sending some messages about his poor connection. In some ways, this was the most inconvenient time for him to join because he had missed all the preparation and was thrown straight into getting ready to do a job interview. I had planned to get the students to do more preparation and brainstorming of questions at this point, but we moved onto the interviews. I feel that they were a little less prepared than I would have liked.

After a slow start and some prompting from me, the students gradually grew in confidence asking and answering questions. It was good to see them producing questions spontaneously and I did some on-the-spot correction, which hopefully was not too intrusive. They all seemed to enjoy the activity – and of course it helps to be told you’ve got the job at the end of the interview!

After this task I moved on to introducing a letter of application for homework. The purpose of this was to consolidate some of the language they had learnt connected to job applications.

Overall, I was quite pleased with the class. The technical issues Omar and Zaid encountered are a frustration but unfortunately an innate part of teaching online and best laid plans still need to mitigate for these eventualities. Apart from the odd stumble, I felt I was using the technology better than previously. In all honesty though, I long to teach in person again. Online teaching is all we can do at present and I need to improve at it, but it is a big challenge. I realise that face-to-face contact brings so much joy to teaching that online classes cannot do, as is the case in other areas of life!

I am still struggling a little with the level of the class because I have spent the vast majority of my teaching career with upper-int to advanced levels. I used a lot of eliciting, correcting, explaining and drilling to help this along.

I am aware that I often demand a lot of my students and this class was demanding. I think they coped with it well with plenty of speaking and listening practice that would be consolidated by the written homework. However, I think I can still improve on scaffolding tasks for intermediate level and doing more language work and perhaps fewer tasks in the time frame.

My tutor mentioned that I could have got more out of the listening and I agree but I didn’t want the listening to dominate the lesson as it was mainly a prelude to the interview task. My tutor also mentioned that I could have spent more time exploring meaning and, in particular, on suprasegmental issues such as intonation when asking questions. I will reflect on that latter point because in my experience students need and enjoy short exercises on intonation. We had in fact done a little work on this in a previous class, but consolidation would have been a useful addition to this class.

Much as I think on occasion I could produce a distinction-level class, I feel this would be very difficult to achieve with this current class in the circumstances, teaching online and troubleshooting so many technical difficulties. Overall, considering the core aim was to improve their speaking and listening on the subject of jobs, overall I felt it was a largely successful class, and I was pleased to get 65%, which was my target grade.

Here is a link to the lesson plan, Powerpoint and worksheets:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!BCsjk8RnnzgChi5OyvuwTadba1cg?e=0xhdbS