Lesson 1

The observed teacher is currently studying for her MA TESOL and we have some  modules that cross over and are both on the Reflective teacher development module. Therefore it seemed useful to observe each other’s lessons. Due to the current COVID-19  pandemic, the lesson was recorded by the teacher who then chose the part of the lesson (about 10 minutes) that she wanted to focus on. Myself and another peer then watched that part of the lesson, in a session on Microsoft teams, with the teacher. Before the session, the teacher sent the clip of the lesson to be observed and relevant information about the lesson.

The lesson was delivered to two of the teachers former students on zoom. She had been their teacher about a year ago in the UK and had kept in touch with them both. The students had started school in the UK at pre-intermediate level and had left at upper-intermediate level. However, they both admitted that they hadn’t used their English and it seemed, from watching the video, that they were currently around lower intermediate level. Both students were female, one was Korean and the other Turkish.

The lesson observed was a speaking lesson as both students had expressed to their teacher that this was an area they would like to focus on. This shows a student centred teaching approach by the teacher. The section I have been invited to observe is after the students have watched part of an animated video about a father and son called ‘Alike’.

The teacher wanted to focus on eliciting as much as possible, teacher talk time and instructions.

Eliciting

I observed the teacher eliciting a lot throughout the 10 minute clip and she asked a number of open ended questions that required the students to give more than just one word answers. Both students were given opportunities to to elaborate on their points and include more information. This gave the teacher a chance to assess the students level of understanding and see where the difficulties may be in how they are able to express themselves in English. The teacher was able to demonstrate her knowledge of the students as during the session she talked about the Turkish student’s understanding of a question, knowing what she wanted to say in Turkish, but being unable to articulate the answer in English. However, this led to the teacher giving the student the answer instead of eliciting some more or asking the other student in the class to help. The teacher was able to see this herself when watching the video back. A good example of how eliciting worked was when the Turkish student was able to demonstrate her understanding of a colour she had initially got wrong. She was able to say the correct colour and then pointed out a picture on her wall to demonstrate her understanding of the colour grey.

It was a shame that towards the end of the session, when both students and the teacher had worked hard to explore what the message of the video was, the teacher gave them the overall answer. It was interesting to explore this further with the teacher and the other peer observing  wondered if this could have been reflection in action. The observed teacher said that she felt the students were starting to struggle a little and felt the need for the lesson to move on. This led to a discussion about giving students time to explain and explore their answers more. The teacher felt she was under time constraint using the free version of zoom that cuts out after 40 minutes and then you have to start another session. This is something I can relate to myself. The warning that the session is coming to an end flashes up on the screen for the host to see and it can impact on the session. The teacher explained about wanting that part of the lesson to end there in order to start a new part of the lesson when restarting the zoom session. I have been in that position myself and it can make you feel pressured and rushed. Perhaps this comes down to the initial planning of the lesson and making sure there is time for students to explore the topic more. I have also found myself that speaking lessons take longer online than offline due to the fact that conversational flow is constrained.

Teacher talk time

One of the first things I noticed when I observed this lesson was the teacher’s calm voice and how she gave students the space and time to think. Within the first few minutes she gave a thumbs up to a student’s answer, which the student instantly reflected back and broke into a huge smile. Further into the lesson the teacher used gestures to describe piles of work on the fathers desk in the video to reduce her talking time. This was reflected back by both students when they answered the question, showing and understanding of what was being asked of them, without the teacher having to use words to explain. The teacher created an environment where students seemed to feel they were part of everything. For example, I saw one student nodding along with the teacher as the other student gave a correct answer. This happened on a number of occasions. We discussed the differences of teacher talk between teaching in a physical or virtual classroom. We all agreed it was easier not to talk when teaching online. You can turn off your video or use break out rooms. Turning off the video can be especially useful when teaching 1:1 or 1:2 lessons as it can feel quite intense at times.  This option may have been beneficial during this lesson after students had watched the video. A peer discussion may have drawn out more thoughts and ideas and enhanced the discussion that followed with the teacher present.

Whilst one of the students was answering a question the teacher interrupted her to make a correction. Unfortunately the student didn’t hear her properly, another difficulty of online teaching, this led to the student losing her flow. The teacher felt that she should have waited until the student had finished and then used the white board to explain the error. I can identify with the teachers difficulties here. Knowing if or when to error correct is a difficult decision to make and this is exacerbated when teaching online.

Instructions 

I felt the teacher was very clear about what she wanted from the students. She would ask a question and at times put the question another way to help make it clearer. I also witnessed good scaffolding. One consideration might be that the teachers expectations of the students. she had watched the video a few times to work out what she wanted from students. However, the students had only seen the video once (the first 4 minutes up until that point) and perhaps weren’t as clear about what the messages of the video were. That said, both students were able to answer questions and seemed relaxed in doing so.

Summary

I thought the part of the lesson I saw was relaxed and engaging. The students seemed to understand what was required and were able to answer the questions being asked.

Having the lesson recorded seems to be a really useful to tool to use for reflection. It gave opportunities to discuss areas and think about different ways of executing parts of the lesson. It also gave an opportunity to see things you might have missed during the lesson. In this case, watching the students mirroring the teachers actions may not have been picked up on. This could create an opportunity that the teacher may want to explore further in the future.

 

Lesson 2

The observed teacher is currently studying for her diploma in TESOL. Due to COVID-19 restrictions I was unable to observe physically in the classroom but she was able to record her lesson and has chosen a 10 minute clip for myself and another peer to watch and reflect on with her. This was sent to us with the relevant information before the session. The lesson involved a Brazilian male who she had taught in Brighton a couple of years ago. He is of C1 level and a very smart, motivated student (which was clearly evident from the video clip). The student had identified problems with phrasal verbs and prepositions, so the teacher was creating a sequence of lessons to address these needs. This was the first lesson, and a bit of a needs analysis to determine what the student knew and understood about certain phrasal verbs.

The teacher had reflected on what she wanted to do in the lesson before teaching it, and what aspects of teaching she had wanted to focus on. She wanted her observers to consider eliciting and scaffolding, teacher talk and interruptions, student thinking time and delayed or no error corrections. Before watching the video together the teacher told us that she felt she came across as ‘wired’ during the this lesson and others she has recorded, and she is consciously trying to calm down. She felt she talks more online and especially when teaching 1:1 and finds the silence difficult to deal with, feeling the need to fill the time. Even though there are times with extended teacher talk time it seemed that, for the most part, she was keeping the conversation going and not necessarily talking too much. It was obvious that the teacher and student had a good relationship and rapport.

Teacher talk and student thinking time

During the first part of the clip I observed how relaxed the student was and seemed to be naturally learning English through having a conversation. As he was listening to the teacher he was reminded of something he wanted to share and he asked her for help with a noun to be able to come up with the phrase ‘playing to his fans’ when talking about Donald Trump. This led into the phrasal verb ‘showing off’ which the teacher picked up on and explored with the student. It flowed really well and felt natural. Whilst I agree there was a lot of Teacher talk time during this first phase, the student is clearly listening and interested and formulating responses. The teacher was concerned that she shared her own experiences but this is not necessarily a bad thing as we want students to share their experiences with us. I think it is about finding the right balance.

During one part of the lesson there is extended student talk time where the teacher just lets him speak. The teacher felt she was reflecting on his learning and understanding of the language at this point. I felt the teacher deserved credit for giving the student the space and opportunity to explore the language. He was able to make the link during this time about phrasal verbs and flexibility and how they can change meaning.

Eliciting and student thinking time

The observed teaching used elicitation to try and get the student to see the differences between literal and metaphorical meanings of phrasal verbs. At one stage the teacher felt she had confused the student by asking for a synonymous verb for ‘get out’. The student was coming up with a number of words but not the one the teacher wanted. I must admit, when I was watching the video I wasn’t able to identify what word she wanted either for a while. As the teacher tried to give more examples it got slightly confusing as to what she wanted. We discussed how long you should go on with examples. I have been in this situation myself before and it can be difficult to know when to just give students the word or if you should continue eliciting until they get there. In this case there was a positive pay off because the student finally got the word ‘escape’. We then discussed that with advanced students it was important  to go beyond the first answer, to probe and go a bit deeper in order to support them to explore the language and make more connections. The teacher was able to reflect after watching the video back that instead of keeping on eliciting  it would have been better to give the student some space and time to think. I expect the reason the teacher kept talking was she was worrying he wasn’t getting the word and trying to help him. A further example of this was when the teacher was trying to elicit the verb ‘remove’ using the phrasal verb ‘take away’. She gave many examples that the student wasn’t able to get. However, using reflection in action and realising the ideas weren’t working, she decided to show the verb using a visual  representation which worked straight away. The student fed back to the teacher that visuals help him to learn, so this is something the teacher can plan for in future lessons.

Scaffolding

I felt the teacher used good scaffolding techniques throughout, building on the students knowledge of phrasal verbs. She was able to use the initial discussion they had about what was going on in the world where the student was using some phrasal verbs. This was followed by asking what phrasal verbs the student knew and trying to elicit different meanings so he had more than one way to use the vocabulary.

Error correction

The teacher had decided not to verbally correct errors at the time they are made, but to type them as notes for herself and come back to them so as not to stop the flow of interaction. There was a slight consequence of this in that you could see her eyes were not on the student at the time of typing the correction and the sound of typing is evident. The teacher said that she had informed the student at the beginning of the lesson and explained she was doing it this way so as not to interrupt his fluency, but she still worried they were aware she was writing the errors down. There was no evidence from the video that the student was bothered by this, but if the teacher was worried she could try using pen and paper instead of typing.

We discussed error correction further and agreed that making a note of an error to feedback later seemed better than interrupting a student mid flow. Another possibility could be to use a recording of a lesson to highlight errors, but as a consequence the feedback would be more delayed. Alternatively the teacher could note down previous errors when students are doing a different activity so that it isn’t so obvious, although does it matter that it is obvious? Maybe if the teacher said at the beginning of a lesson they would be making notes on a variety of different things including errors, that would take the emphasis off. It seems difficult to me know if error correction is beneficial or not. Some students have been very clear with me that they want to be corrected. On the other hand, if during a speaking lesson (as the observed lesson was) the student is making themselves understood, do we need to error correct? I think it can depend on the students being taught and the type of lesson. As a general rule, we agreed during our discussion that if errors were relevant to the target language of the lesson then they should be addressed.

Summary

I felt the part of the lesson I saw was good and delivered well by the teacher. The relationship they have is clearly relaxed and respectful giving plenty of opportunities for learning.

Going forward the teacher will be able to incorporate more visual learning techniques to help with eliciting and cut down on teacher talk time. Again, this shows how valuable recording lessons are. It gives opportunities to watch, reflect and make some actions for the next time you teach. It may also be worth trying to record a lesson and use this to give delayed error feedback to see if it is useful or not.

Further Reflection

When observing this lesson I had been quite taken with Sian’s materials and how she had adjusted them to deliver an online lesson. They were simple, yet really effective. Sian kindly shared these materials and the source she had taken them from. I was able to use them in a subsequent lesson after making some adjustments to make it more relevant to the students I was teaching. Seeing the materials used by Sian in an actual lesson was so helpful and had inspired me to use a varied version. 

Lesson Three

The link below is to the discussion on Teams between Sian, Anna and myself. Sian’s is the first lesson we observed and discussed.

https://web.microsoftstream.com/video/e9607a24-64b4-41f9-8ee9-457c3ee7dfff

This is the second time I have observed Sian, who is currently studying for her TESOL diploma.  The lesson was recorded, observed and discussed on Teams with Sian, Anna (who is currently studying for her Masters in TESOL) and myself present.  We had decided to observe this lesson using the SETT principles, as discussed in my post titled Peer observations – General thoughts and SETT. Sian chose a clip from an online lesson with a Spanish student at around B1 level. This was their first online lesson together, although Sian had taught her face to face previously.  The student had requested to do certain phrasal verbs. The lesson focused on vocabulary which meant that Sian was in skills and systems mode according to the SETT framework. When Sian had watched this section of the lesson back herself, she felt there were lots of display questions and no personalisation. However, the personalisation part had come later in the lesson.

Sian uses pictures and asks what is this person is doing (a  display question). For example, using a picture of someone ‘getting off’ the bus. The student answered “they out….they off….they take away”. Sian replies saying “she is .um um. off the bus” and then writes this on the white board, displaying scaffolding. The student replies saying she is thinking of ‘go’ or ‘take’. Sian explains how we would use ‘take’ metaphorically, so the student opts for “she is going off the bus”. Sian acknowledges that this could be used but a better way of saying it would be to use the phrasal verb “getting off”. This shows a use of form focused feedback. After answering Sians display question “what is the man doing?”, the student then goes on to say the differences when we talk about ‘getting into’ and ‘getting out’ the car. Sian offers direct repair here saying “getting out of the car”. What was great was seeing the student feeling comfortable to show her knowledge of the different uses of phrasal verbs with different forms of transport and asking for some clarification about trains.

Throughout this discourse Sian displayed teacher extended wait time on three occasions, one of 3 seconds, one of 6 seconds and one of 8 seconds. We discussed the pros and cons of teacher extended wait time and the possibilities of some students feeling uncomfortable. It can be difficult to make a decision about this. Some students, as Sian identified, seem to be quite happy to be given time to wait. Others may feel put under pressure. I also think that it can be intense during a 1:1 class. If you have more students in a class, often one of them will usually come up with an answer. What was interesting was Sians thoughts about the difference between possible extended wait times depending on whether the teacher is using display questions or referential questions. When using a display question the teacher is looking for a certain answer, and the student may genuinely not know this how ever long you give them. However, when using referential questions, when you’re looking for a students thoughts or experiences of something, extended wait time may be appropriate. Since teaching Swedish students at Loxdale I have had to work very hard on giving teacher extended wait time. Many Swedish students are very comfortable with silence and taking time to answer questions, therefore it is just me feeling uncomfortable and not the students. Although I have to be extremely careful if one of the students is suffering from some anxiety.

One of the pictures shown is a remote control and a TV. The student says “turn it off” and “turn it on” and then says I think it is transitive? Sian echoes ‘transitive?’ back  using intonation to make it a a question and asks if there is an object. Sian is seeking clarification from the student here. The student seemed a little confused about the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs. Sian offers a brief explanation but chose not to go into much detail as this wasn’t the focus of the lesson and the student seemed to be getting confused. I think this was a good decision to make in the moment. It is an area that could be picked up again in the future, however, it wouldn’t really be helpful to the student being able to use these particular phrasal verbs being taught now. Sian then asked another display question “what about the volume”? Sian gives the student some extended wait time and you can hear her formulating her answer. The answer she gave needed some reformulation from Sian and it was great to hear the student repeat the correct answer and take her own initiative to write this down.

Sian picked up that on several occasions she interrupts the student to say “yeah” as confirmation of what was being said. Sian acknowledged that she would like to work on giving non verbal affirmative feedback and this is an area she finds particularly difficult. My personal feeling is that this can be harder to do online rather than face to face. Students can only see your head and shoulders on zoom or teams which can make body language harder to identify.

We discussed an area of the lesson where Sian felt there was extended teacher talk and identified four sentences that she says. However, during this time, Sian is reformulating the students answer by using the phrasal verb ‘take out’ in a sentence and then models the use of the verb. This student is of B1 level so even though there is quite a lot of repetition from Sian of the sentence and the phrase, she is using it to clarify. For example, explaining that taking out some books is the same as borrowing some books. This also offers some reassurance to the student as she is often unsure of herself.

Overall we were able to identify display questions, scaffolding, extended wait time, extended teacher time. There is no content feedback, however, the focus was on vocabulary. There was no extending student time. A lot of this section of Sians lesson uses display questions and the student does answer. There could be the possibility in the future of asking some personalised (referential) questions in order for the student to have more extended talk time. But Sian has more discussion based questions during the second part of the lesson.

I think it was a useful process using  SETT as it gives a framework to use during a short space of time. Sometimes when I watch a whole lesson back there seems so much that I don’t know what to focus on. At least this way, we are able to see if we are achieving our aims of the lesson at that point in time and then can focus on improvements in specific areas.

Lesson Four

The link below is to the discussion on Teams between Sian, Anna and myself. Anna’s is the final lesson we observed and discussed.

https://web.microsoftstream.com/video/e9607a24-64b4-41f9-8ee9-457c3ee7dfff

Although we were only required to observe three lessons for this course, we had the opportunity to observe four lessons within our group. As with the Sians lesson, discussed above, we used the SETT principles as framework to give feedback on Anna’s lesson. The lesson had been recorded and the clip chosen was watched and discussed via Teams with Anna, Sian and myself present. The class consisted of twelve A2 students in the physical classroom being taught the grammar points ‘too much, too many, enough, and not enough’. Anna had adapted the lesson from English File. Anna admitted that she finds countable and uncountable a grey area that seems to be taught in a black and white fashion. There are so many variables when teaching this, that it can be confusing for students. Before the lesson had started, Anna had overheard a student talking about having 4 or 5 coffees a day, which is using coffee as a countable noun. However, Anna would be teaching coffee as uncountable. There is a section in the video that I will discuss further down in the post, where some of these areas are considered. Anna admitted to being extremely nervous about sharing this clip from her lesson as she was unhappy with the way the lesson had gone. However, she felt that this would be the best platform to share it and get some feedback.

Before the clip shown, Anna had been eliciting sentences using pictures, which was all done verbally.  The video clip begins with Anna nominating students to concept check.  She was asking ‘is this countable?’, and then writing the form on the white board.  During this part of the lesson Anna used display questions, she scaffolds using reformulation, and gives form focused feedback. Sian identified that Anna seemed to be going through this part of the lesson very fast. Anna felt that this was because she felt they were ‘re-hashing’ what had already been done verbally and the students already knew it. She also worried that this part of the lesson was taking too long. I could understand Anna’s position here because, as a teacher, you want to check that the students have understood the grammar point. However, if feels repetitive. It’s a difficult situation because some of the students in the class were about to go up to a B1 level and clearly had a good grasp of the subject in comparison to students who hadn’t covered this before. We discussed whether the concept checking could have been done when each sentence was elicited. For example, could Anna have elicited that coffee was uncountable, followed this with a concept checking question and then wrote the form on the board. This way, Anna may have felt that she wasn’t being repetitive and that it wasn’t taking up too much lesson time.

There is a lot of teacher talk from Anna as she continues through this section. I felt that some of this was justifiable as Anna was using display questions and then scaffolding by reformulating answers to give further examples. Anna felt that she could have asked for students suggestions more. For example, the answer the student gave about water was using water as uncountable. Anna could have then asked the class, using a display question, “can water be countable” and ask for an example. Anna felt she was rushing through in order to get to the next stage of the lesson. This meant that instead of enabling students to come up with answers, she gave them the answers.

Anna admitted that at this point of the lesson she remembered she should have been modelling and drilling the sentences as they’d been going along. This had been part of her written plan but something she had forgotten to include when teaching the lesson. In the moment she decided to drill all the sentences with the class. Was this the right decision or not? I think that because Anna had already felt this section had gone on too long then maybe it would have been better to miss it out on this occasion. However, whilst I couldn’t see the students, from what I heard they all seemed to be engaging with whatever Anna asked.

Anna is clearly very good at monitoring. This has been evident in both lessons I have watched. She is also very good at noticing if a student seems a little anxious when being asked a question. This was evident when she asked a socially anxious student a display question and Anna could see she looked very uncomfortable. Anna chose to move onto another student instead of giving extended wait time which could have increased the students anxiety. Whilst the next student Anna asked was one of the weakest students and couldn’t answer the question, Anna was quick to identify this and opened up the question to the whole class. I think she managed this really well.

During the lesson Anna had taught chocolate as being uncountable. She had overheard some students discussing ‘chocolates’ and brilliantly revisited this. She asked the students what they had been discussing and asked them to identify the difference between ‘chocolate’ and ‘chocolates’, which they were able to do. This is a great example of students identifying some exceptions or differences to what is being taught. Anna had noticed this and given them the time and space to explore it together.

As a group we discussed the difficulties of teaching a class during COVID times when social distancing is in place. Anna had a class where some students clearly understood the grammar and had a good grasp to it. However, other students needed more support. In ‘normal’ times, Anna would have spent more time supporting them at their desk but this is not possible at the moment.

Anna shared that this was the first lesson she had filmed for a long time and after watching it back had wanted to work more on extended wait time. She has since done this and was able to incorporate it into an observed zoom lesson. To me, this shows how valuable recording a lesson can be. Using the SETT framework she was able to identify an area that she specifically wanted to work on and then put it into practice. Brilliant!