Great Day at Work with Robynne and a PD session!

Tuesday 8 July 2008

It was very interesting to experience another dynamics of this group of students in an upper level. I learned that teachers' characters play such a big role in the class dynamics and atmosphere, which sometimes does not have much impact on students' motivation and learning achievement.

This class had two different teachers: Robynne (a teacher on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday) and Joy (a teacher on Wednesday and Friday). These two teachers have different characters, which was claimed by many students that it was a good balance.

Robynne is a traditional kind of teacher, who is strict and serious, yet she is very in depth with insightful details when it comes to explaining any subject matters being taught in the classroom. Many students who seek for improvement in English really like her. Today, she started off the class with a grammar exercise since she learned that there would be latecomers. Giving out the exercise as a revision certainly benefit both who show up in class on time and late. This way it would be fair for both side including the teacher since she won't have to repeat the new materials. The exercise was on mixed verb form based on compositions written by students who were members of a multicultural class, which is perfect for the students. While they were working on the exercise, the teacher called on some students with their writing assignment. She pointed out their errors in order for them to be aware and try not to make the same errors again. I quite like the method and would adopt it to my class, so I won't waste any second in the classroom. Moreover, I would try to find an answer to their question as much as I could at once, so I won't leave them hanging with the misery of the untold answers to the questions they have. However, if the situation gets too carried away and they would always rely on you to correct their mistakes, I might have to ask them to try to go back to their past mistakes and learn from them independently.

After the students completed the exercise, the teacher answered the questions and explained each answer with insightful details. As I could tell, students learned a lot from her explanations. Then, this is awesome, she had her students read the exercise with the correct answers out loud. She said, "Make as much noise as you can!" How great is that to have a noisy classroom! The teacher said this was the way to improve their English--learning how to speak English or write English grammatically correct by sound. As many native speakers always say when they correct try to understand something, "That sound good/sound right to me"

Then, students practiced their note taking and summary skills by watching a VDO program on Baroness and the Brain. Here what I did was preparing and setting the VDO program for the teacher. The topic per se was very interesting, so it kind of captivated students’ attention. While watching, the teacher stopped once every often to pinpoint and write down some keywords and expressions on the board, so students understood the program better and be able to take notes and write a summary. About the program, it was very intriguing to know that we can actually improve our brain connection by using our imagination or just by thinking. This means that if we want to be able to play piano, we can literally learn the theory of how to work out our fingers and then just practice it by using an imagination. It is about using positive thinking to succeed in doing something. This is a study of Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield. Her research showed that people can think themselves to better brains! The research was initiated by her concern of children being very passive nowadays—consuming too much animated media and living in such animated lifestyle, which deprive them from activating their brain. Watching TV too much or doing something too much with technology seems to destroy their brain connections. Thus, as teachers, they need to learn how to put students’ ideas to practice. In other words, they need to learn how to teach students to improve or stimulate their brain connections.

After students finished taking notes, they had to write a summary and shared it with their partner by reading it out loud to each other and constructive criticized each other’s work. Meanwhile, the teacher and I walked around to help out and guide them on their summaries.

After lunch, we had a learning vocabulary hour. The book we used was Focus on Vocabulary (mastering the academic word list) by Diane Schmitt and Norbert Schmitt. The teacher discussed the words with students.Here, she came up with a game to help practice the grammar points that they were weak at. The game was called Word/Sentence Game. We divided them into two groups. The teacher wrote down a word (learned in the classroom from the VDO program they had watched) on a board on both sides each round and had them one-by-one build a sentence around the given words. The last person had to finish and correct the sentences. Then, they had to switch the players and started with the second student first for a new round with a new word.

At the end of the day, I was so thankful to help the teacher and observe the teaching simultaneously as I learned a whole lot of good activities to be used in a writing course. Not only does the teacher teach grammar to the students, but she also teaches them how to think and organise their thought through integrated skills--by using games to improve their sentence structures, by having them watch VDO programs as a tool to improve their note taking and summarizing, by having them read articles as a tool to better their skimming and scanning skills. They learn more than just writing in this course; actually, they are able to employ and practice all their 4 skills.

Also, I have gathered good traits of teachers in general. 1) have good general knowledge on different areas or else they have to prepare material and find more infor about the subject matters ahead of time. 2) recognise students' problems and find ways to go circumvent them. For example, we could help late comers by starting the class with a warm-up activity.

Extra activity: PD at lunch time on Dictogloss by the department member Jacqie from MEAP (Mixed English for Academic Program). This is a grammar activity which is suitable for any levels. Teachers just have to adjust the means of doing it or they can cover tenses or whatever grammar points that have been taught in class. The aims of dictogloss are (1) to provide an opportunity for students to put their grammar knowledge into practice, (2) it encourages students to find out what they do and do not know about English grammar, and (3) it upgrades and refines the learner's use of the language through a thorough analysis of grammar and language choices. In short, dictogloss is divided in to stages: (1) the teacher prepares the students for what is to come, (2) the teacher reads or plays a tape of a short passage, (3)the passage is read at the speed of a newsreader, (4) The students write down what they can--usually content words, (5) students then reconstruct the text by pooling their notes, and (6) at the end, the text is analysed carefully.