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

For my 3rd teaching observation, I had planned a class for March 19th but this was cancelled due to the Corona crisis. I had done all the planning so decided to adapt this class for online using Zoom.

Two days previously I delivered my first ever online class. We focused on the upheaval caused by Corona and discussed what has changed in terms of restrictions. They wrote a personal piece of writing about the crisis and their own perspectives.

In the observed Thursday class, the focus was on healthy living, vocabulary and reading, which are areas in which they need more practice. Motivation and concentration have been issues in this class, so I have been putting more effort into activating the class, which I have documented in some of my peer observations in the past month.

The section on vocabulary in context is in response to the students’ underdeveloped ability to make educated guesses. They too often pick up the cellphone to consult the dictionary. I packed quite a lot of discussion and vocabulary into the first hour before they spent a solid half an hour doing reading comprehension.

This was only my second day teaching online so there were teething problems. In particular organising breakout groups can be complicated. Some students were using Zoom on a cellphone which makes delivery harder so I asked them to use their laptops.

Overall, the class was partially successful. Within the context of being my third ever online course, it went quite well but in an overall context I would regard it as problematic. Overall, I am still getting to grips with the technology with a lot of troubleshooting, and a particular problem was students not having the book.

The opening discussion about long life was quite good and I decided for simplicity to write directly onto the Powerpoint instead of switching to a whiteboard. This worked okay. I decided initially not to mute all the class or use the hands up tool. This caused a bit of disorder and I learnt quickly to target questions to specific students to mitigate this. The quiz went quite well and achieved my objective of activating them.

Watching the recording back, I need to be more aware that if I move my head away from the computer and talk while looking at the book to the side, then I can become inaudible so that is something to work on.

I tried to deal with the issue of students not having the book by getting them to screenshot pages, which was successful for the vocabulary exercise because it was short. It was harder for such a long reading though. I’m not sure what the alternative is because we are not allowed to send them the PDFs due to copyright.

I then introduced the topic of guessing vocabulary from context. Initially this discussion went quite well but students struggled with the short exercise on immortal and immature from the short reading on the jellyfish. I am trying to improve my teaching of vocabulary (as documented in my last peer observation) with only partial success.

I then set them a vocab exercise. Feedback was okay, although I noticed many students found the exercise difficult. I have persisted with giving students this type of vocab exercise because they usually struggle but finding ways of improving their performance is difficult.

I usually use a lot more short discussions with partners in class to discuss ideas or to compare answers but I find it is not practical to split students into breakout groups for very short tasks. I need more guidance and experience on use of breakout groups.

I set up the groups to discuss some quotes that I had added about long life. This was only partially successful. One group discussed quite well while the other didn’t but this may be a question of their motivation rather than a deficiency of the task.

We discussed the quotes and reflections on life in detail and I felt this was partially successful. The aim of this was to prep them further for the reading but on reflection it would have been more logical to have got them practising the vocabulary they had acquired. Instead the vocabulary exercise was mainly to assist with the reading.

I then set them a reading comprehension from the book. I had to continue troubleshooting and allowing screenshots of the reading – problematic but it just about worked. For homework I set further vocab practice and questions about longevity from the book.

In conclusion, it was a problematic but partially successful class. Some good discussion, a good activation and some success at teaching vocabulary and giving reading practice. On the downside, I still feel I could improve my teaching of vocabulary and my use of the online platform, particularly in terms of managing discussions and breakout groups.

One final point, I have failed to persuade students to turn on their cameras for classes. We discussed it last time and they feel quite self conscious. It definitely affects dynamics that they can’t see each other and I can’t see them but I cannot keep pressing the point if they are reluctant.

Further reflections following my tutorial:

My tutor agreed that the session was partially successful. There were a number of issues that I have reflected further on:

Firstly, it’s important to consider the goal of activation activities. I have made it a goal, particularly with this class, to improve the activation at the beginning to try to improve their motivation. In this class the quiz I added in about life spans of different creatures seemed to ignite their interest and got the class off to an enthusiastic start. However, my tutor questioned whether it really contributed to the core aims of the class: improving vocabulary and reading skills. I think it’s a valid point and I reflected further on this. On one hand, I don’t think every single part of a class has to contribute to the main aims, but on the other hand, it’s important not to digress. The students acquired general knowledge in terms of content and that in itself can help their motivation. It is true that the activation didn’t contribute much in terms of language though, beyond the names some of the creatures mentioned (clam, dragonfly etc). I accept that in some ways the quiz was a little ‘off-piste’. Yes, it helped to get them interested, but without really building towards the lesson’s key aims. I think the ideal activation has to do both of these, so I will look to make activation both eye-catching and more relevant to the lesson’s core aims in future.

Secondly, I need to do some of the basics better with online teaching – taking the register by getting each student to answer their name would enable me to check which students can hear and talk. I am doing this as a matter of course now. Also, checking the online chat more frequently as some students were trying to communicate with me in that way and I didn’t notice at first. This has come with practice.

Thirdly, and this is the most complex issue, my tutor questioned whether the evidence shows that  guessing vocabulary from context is actually any more effective and efficient than using a dictionary in many cases. This is an interesting point and one I need to investigate further. By my own admission, I struggle with teaching vocabulary ‘techniques’ on a deeper level beyond eliciting, explaining and checking understanding. My instinct is to prepare university students better for their studies by trying to get them to make educated guesses more often than using the dictionary, but in many cases, a dictionary is probably needed. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how skilled a tutor is at explaining or how skilled a student is at guessing, the easiest way to find the corresponding word in their own language.

I recall from our lectures on lexis last semester that about 5000 word families are needed for upper intermediate level but 9000 word families for fluent reading at near native speaker level. I suspect that for many of my students, they are well below this fluent level and despite my regular requests that they write down new words and learn them, experience shows me that only the best students tend to do so.

I also recall from our lectures that it takes an average of 7 times of repeated exposures to a new word for it to really be ‘learnt’. That is a frightening number to confront if I introduce half a dozen or a dozen new words in one lesson, but Rome wasn’t built in a day! I think my conclusion on teaching vocabulary is that I can teach a few key techniques to guess meaning from context but all in all, there’s no substitute for repeated exposure and students getting down to the arduous process outside class of learning and practising new words, a process they often avoid. If using a dictionary assists this process, then so be it.

For lesson plan and materials, click on the following link:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aisjk8RnnzgChh3ZLUTa0iP4w_jP?e=oCBze1

For my second observed teaching practice, I had a new class of students for EAP. The students took their four language exams in early January and those that failed to pass all the skills were reassigned classes for the rest of term before a second exam sitting in April.

The two-hour class was focused on preparation for essay writing in the first observed hour with the second hour spent writing the essay.

I decided to use the exact essay topic of their recent writing exam as an example. The topic was on the subject of whether we should eat less meat to help health, animal welfare and the environment. I thought this example was particularly relevant to teach and review some key essay writing techniques – in particular supporting details, counter arguments and refutations.  These are often areas in which students are weak and particularly Arabic students. This links in to my recent essay for the methodology module in which I focused on Arabic students’ difficulties in writing for EAP classes. As a culture that eats a relatively large amount of meat, this topic may be especially difficult for the students to see other points of view.

I did quite a lot of eliciting of ideas on the topic and then put students in discussion groups to brainstorm support and arguments before presenting key information on the areas on the board as well as examples of paragraphs. I supplemented this with a handout on paragraph structure and key language for counter arguments and refutations. I tried to keep the pace of the class quite steady. Overall I feel it was a successful class with consolidation of several key areas of weakness.

However, there are still some areas to work on. As they are a new class, it is quite hard work to get them talking and working with each other. I noticed immediately that there were half a dozen students who were engaged and eager to contribute while the rest of the class of 15 were less engaged (or at least quiet). This is the first area that I feel I could improve on. I already use techniques of calling upon students by name to answer questions rather than deferring to those who put their hands up but I feel engagement could have been better.

Secondly, there were issues of classroom management that I find difficult to deal with effectively. Firstly, students are all Arabic and too often revert to L1 when in group discussions. I regularly point this out but am sometimes at a loss at how to address continual use of L1 after warnings have already been given. Another classroom management point is students’ use of the bathroom. I have noticed that students often tend to ask to go to the toilet during the class and frequently come back after more time than would be considered normal – they are probably wasting time outside, on their phones etc. It’s a challenging issue that often interferes with the classroom dynamic and one I have discussed in my Critical Incidents section.

Lastly, I am mindful of teaching too closely to the test in this class. I prepared them to write a 300-word five-paragraph format essay in controlled conditions. It could be argued that it is of limited use for university study. I was mindful of this but it does seem necessary with many of these students to reinforce basics such as paragraph structure and quality of supporting detail. In particular, it’s important to reinforce that they need to consider opposing points of view in counter arguments as this will prepare them well for university education.

However, too often I feel I am teaching essay writing at equivalent high school level and it is a challenge to give them more useful research skills that equip them better for their degrees. It’s important to note that students also do a dedicated study skills module where they are required to research and reference, but in that module, many struggle to do this well, so it’s clearly an area in which they need all the practice they can get.

Further reflections following feedback

We had a very productive meeting to chat through our reflections on the lesson. My tutor gave me some interesting suggestions on how to improve classroom management.

We discussed having a class contract or at least setting some very clear ground rules to cut down on L1 use and students leaving the class. I have previously used the technique of asking students to leave their phones in the room if they leave and I intend to use this again, as it is quite effective.

We also discussed techniques for getting the students moving around the classroom, interacting with topics, using post-it notes. This is something I have done in the past but not recently with writing preparation and I think it could work well, so I will reflect on that.

We also discussed using not only model paragraphs but examples of poor and mediocre paragraphs for students to identify common errors. This would definitely be useful in future.

A key conclusion of the class was that, even though it was quite successful, a key issue was that I was working very hard, while many students were not engaged. My challenge is to create activities that prompt them to work and learn as they are doing so. Of course, it’s necessary for me to present and teach key points at times, but I need to improve at balancing this Teacher Talking Time with the entire group of students being actively involved rather than a select few.

Lesson plan, presentation and handout from the class can be found on the following link:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aisjk8RnnzgChWS7E9ZMmW8dPQ4q?e=UJ4zjd

My first observed teaching practice was with my language class. The class is higher intermediate – most around IELTS 5.5-6. Students are mainly 18-20 years old. Most are Arabic speakers with one Vietnamese, two Albanian and one Iranian. It’s a language skills class which combines English with study skills. They have received nearly a term of English (8 hours per week across two modules) and have just completed their mock exams in the 4 skills. They have their first real exam in January. If they pass, then they don’t need to complete the second term of language classes. Students who fail any of the 4 skills, retake in April and, failing that, in June. All students hope to start university year 1 next September.

The learner outcomes of the class were: to consolidate and practise expressions of cause and effect, to listen for specific information and, beyond those main 2 outcomes, to practice all four language skills on the theme of cause and effect.

The first aspect of the class I wanted to focus on was the question of when to use the book and when to diverge from it. I used parts of chapter 5 of the book Pathways for this class with some supplementary materials.

I feel that Pathways does some things quite well – particularly, its use of reading and listening materials as well as vocabulary exercises and activation discussions. However, I feel the book is not as good at constructing production tasks around specific language or grammar, and less strong on writing tasks. With this in mind, I decided to supplement.

I began the class by discussing London and asking students to predict how many people visit the city and also predict other popular cities around the world. This whetted their appetite for the opening pages of the chapter, which had statistics on top tourism cities. Here the book introduced the topics of tourism and its effects quite well. I missed out the long reading in the chapter because I wanted to focus more on students’ production of language. With this in mind, I added a Powerpoint slide on expressions of cause and effect to accompany the acitvity on page 98 which asked them to identify expressions.

The next activity in the book was a short reading and then a video listening on negative effects of tourism on the Galapagos Islands. The book had some useful discussion points but I felt it could be improved so I supplemented with some images of environmental problems on the islands for students to first discuss and then to actually write about. In my experience of teaching the class, it is the writing that students struggle with and neglect most. I felt it was important to consolidate their knowledge by getting them to write sentences using the target language. I think this was quite successful. One modification I would make for the future though would be to leave spaces under the photographs for students to write their sentences, as many students were unsure where to write. This would also give them a neat piece of paper to take away from class.

I then read a short passage to the students about the Galapagos, after which they did a vocabulary preparation exercise and the listening comprehension. The comprehension questions in the book were a little too easy for the class and perhaps on reflection I could have drafted more challenging questions. At this point I decided to spontaneously add some more cause and effect practice by getting the students to look at some of the environmental solutions that have been introduced in the Galapagos and again use the target language of cause and effect to describe positive effects of these.

The second aspect of the class I wanted to focus on was the range of activities. In an hour-long class with higher intermediate I feel it is important to keep things moving quite quickly and to mix up activities. Much of this was driven by the materials, in this case chapter 5 of the book. I feel that Pathways has strong activation techniques – in this case some statistics and a short reading on positive effects of tourism that students can scan and discuss. The chapter also has good reading and listening activities with some good spoken practice too but, frustratingly, the writing tasks are all bunched at the end of the chapter. The students need to get through about 18 pages of other activities to get to the writing sections. This is why I chose to incorporate some short writing activities into the class.

It was a two-hour class and after the observation finished on the hour, we continued with the chapter and I set homework for a cause and effect essay. It was necessary to jump forwards to the writing section, omitting chunks of the chapter, to get to this. I think it’s important as a teacher to have the confidence to use the materials to meet objectives rather than being slave to the materials. This is something I feel I succeed at on some occasions but on other occasions, without adequate preparation, I can follow a sequence in a book that I don’t feel totally confident about. This is something to work on in the future.

The third aspect of the class I wanted to focus on was the language itself. One of the challenges of the class is that most of the students are quite a high level and will be expected to pass this language module first time after Christmas. This is obviously very positive for them but it can be problematic at times for me as the teacher because they find much of the material quite easy. I felt that the book needed supplementing with more expressions of cause and effect and also more written practice in particular. My students are good at discussing issues but struggle more when putting pen to paper so I decided to give them more vocabulary to use and then get them to first discuss cause and effects before writing sentences. I presented the expressions of cause and effect on a Powerpoint slide which I printed for each student to reference when doing both spoken and written practice. It helped to focus their production and I regularly reminded them to use the target language.

Overall, I thought that the class was quite successful. I kept the pace moving relatively quickly and reinforced use of target language regularly. The struggle remains to challenge the students sufficiently when many of them sail through the material but I think that the insertion of written activities went some way towards achieving this goal.

I will add some further reflections on the class below following feedback from my tutor. The first issue was that my lesson plan was inadequate. This was an oversight on my part which I corrected for the following observations.

My tutor raised a number of issues that I have reflected on:

• The issue of students drifting into usage of LA, in this case Arabic. This is an issue I have struggled with at the college, especially because over half of the cohort are Arabic speakers. Usually I would try to pair students with speakers of another language but it is a real challenge when numbers do not allow this.
• Reading aloud material. I must have been nervous because for some reason I read aloud the short reading passage from the book. I never do this! Not really very helpful and not something to repeat.
• Responding to videos. My tutor noted that the activities based on the video were all comprehension but allowing students to reflect more deeply on the content in pairs might have worked.

Following this feedback, I realise that the class was not as successful as I had hoped in some ways. Building sentences about cause and effect was a little easy for this strong upper-int class. My thinking here had been informed by my peer observation of a colleague’s teaching of cause and effect. However, that class was intermediate level, in which focus on phrase and sentence level was more appropriate. This was an example of me not stretching the class sufficiently, so that was my main area to improve upon.

Lesson plan and presentation/handout materials can be found on this link:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aisjk8RnnzgChWET9XY9_A9MoEVs?e=bsTiBq