Listening Activity MT (Presentation Stage: starts at 8:40)

I need to start focusing on the positives of my development. I keep trying to remind myself that this is not a race and that there is no competition but myself…

The positives:

• At the warm-up stage of my lessons, the students are responding well to the speak-with-your-partner segments. At first, I thought that the students would shut down and not even attempt and dialog. After trying for a few lessons they are starting to get the hang of it. I’m happy when the students just ask the questions “How’s it going?” and “How was your weekend?” Even if they can’t speak entirely in English, the attempt means a lot… PROGRESS! 

•  I’m also trying to maximize the English speech in my class. I’m starting to have students expand phrases into sentences and repeat key words and phrases whenever there is a chance. Before, if there were directions on the PPT/WB, I would have just said it once, thinking that the students understood what I said. Now, I have the students repeat the instructions together, maximizing English as much as possible.

• In the listening activity, there were two things that went well. First, I used ‘real’ recordings with my friends and that gained the students interests. My friends are from different countries, so the students were able to listen to different accents. Second, I wanted my students to listen to the recordings for only one time. After listening to the first conversation, I found that many of my students were having trouble filling out the worksheet (too many blanks). I didn’t want to, but looking back at the lesson, I was glad that I played the recordings twice (and no more… BARGAINING!).

The constructive:

•  Watching my lesson again, I still controlled a lot of the discourse in the classroom. I need to maximize their English and not constrain their speaking time. Instead of stopping and letting them discuss the conversations one by one, I could have had them listen once (entirely) and then one more time straight through. Then give them more time to discuss with their pairs and then the entire group/team.

• I really need to work on my ‘Top-Down’ explaining. I am such a detailed person that I always do things from the ‘Bottom-Up’. I could’ve just explained that “We are going to listen to my friend’s today. We need to listen to these 3 things.” Explaining from the ‘Bottom-Up’ not only wastes time, but increases confusion.

Overall:

• Not bad, but definitely just started out of the running-blocks. Way better than when I started. Now if I can just be CONSISTENT with my lessons and teaching, I might not need to drink so much on the weekends (semi-joking).

Dealing With Students That Refuse To Participate.

This week was a really tough week for me. I created a role playing activity based on illnesses and doctor's suggestions for my 5th graders:

• ‘I have a ________’
• stomachache
• fever
• headache
• cold
• runny nose
• earache
• toothache
• Take some medicine.
• Drink a lot of water.
• Go to bed early and get some rest.
• Wash your hands.

The students (in pairs) were given a symptom card and a doctor’s suggestion card. They had to play the role of a patient and a doctor. I wanted to give my students some creative license in role playing. Many of the students did a fine job, but there were some students who fought me every step of the way. One example was a student (girl) who refused to participate with her partner (boy). She wanted to role play with her friend. I told her that she needed to work with the partner next to her. She suddenly threw the papers on aside and ignored what I was saying. Out of frustration, I yelled at her saying “Why are you acting like this!?” That definitely was a ‘great’ way to start the Monday. The problem is that my Korean skills are limited and I cannot communicate normally with students in these situations. I know that yelling wasn't the best move on my part, but having patience on Mondays is not my strongest suit. Next time, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to let the students partner up with the friends they want, and the remaining students can be assigned partners.

My Warm-Up Micro-Teaching Lesson

Looking back at my Micro-Teaching lesson, I could have do so much more to promote English speaking in my class.I am still too controlled of my students. At the start of the lesson, it would have been better for the students to repeat the sentence strips on the board, but instead I jumped into the 'miming activity'. I still have a mental block when teaching English. I keep thinking that the students cannot perform tasks by themselves or with their partners. I want to make sure that I am holding the student's hands, but that will not help their development at all. Throughout the video and other filmed lessons, I am the focal point of the lessons. I need to shift the power ratio over to the students and get them move involved.

Warm-up Lesson on Numbers 1-10

My lesson this week involved teaching an after school class of 1st graders. With this class, I was given the green light to teach any topic of my choice. During first few weeks I taught the students phonics but this lesson moved onto numbers (1-10). I wasn’t sure if the students had prior knowledge of numbers in English. So to make sure that I activated schema, I put a number of different materials in four separate bags. For example, I had a yellow, purple, green and blue bag. The bags had an item inside that corresponded with a number. The yellow bag had two DVDs, the purple bag had 6 dice, the green bag had 5 balls, the blue bag had seven glue sticks, and so forth.

As the warm-up started, I place myself at the front of the classroom with the “mystery bags” visibly lined up. The main goal of the warm-up was to engage the students’ interests by activating schema. The students did not know what was inside in the bag, but they took some guesses, such as candy, pencils and scissors.

I had the students tell me which bag to open to see what was inside. I then pulled out the item(s) and elicited the students to count out loud.

Here’s an example from the lesson:

1. Me: [picked the purple bag and pulled out a glue stick]
2. Ss: Glue! [ in Korean]
3. Me: Yea! Glue.
4. Me: One! [took out one glue stick]
5. Me: Two! [hand motioning students to count with me as I pulled more out]
6. Ss: Three!
7. Ss: Four!
8. Ss: Five!
9. Ss: Six!

After we counted, I drew the items on the board to help build for the main activity.

I knew that I promoted monologic discourse with the students, but that was actually my goal. I had no how much knowledge my students knew about numbers, so I had to be extremely basic and monologic with my discourse. As an intro lesson warm-up I felt that I achieved what I set out to do for this lesson. Next time I could ask the students to guess how many items I will be pulling out to make sure that the students are active. 

My Warm-up Lesson: "Stop & Play" Miming

For my 5th grade warm-up lesson, I wanted to do three things:

1) Activate Schema
2) Create Interpersonal Connections
3) Relieve Teacher Control

In activating schema, I started the class off with a miming activity. 8 sentences were placed on the board for the students to see. This was to activate the schema that they were going to use these sentences for the classroom discourse. As my co-teacher and I started to to mime out each sentence, the students were forced to use any prior schema to help decide the order of the conversation.

After the miming, I allowed the students to talk in groups. The students activated their interpersonal skills to help negotiate and solve the problem. The students spoke for about one minute. It was great to see some students react differently in their groups. I could see that come students quickly became leaders while some students just listened. Some students started to present notes that they wrote down and talk about their findings.

I hoped to relieve some teacher control, but I surely could have done more. Though the warm-up was more on the monologic side, I tried to have students speak and interact with other students in different ways. At the end of the lesson, my co-teacher and I were calling on groups to put the sentences in order. Next time, I will step off the stage and let the students come up to change it themselves.

My Weekly Dilemma: ESL with Special Needs Students

In every one of my classes, I have a few students that are considered ‘special’. Just a few hours ago I had a 1^st and 3^rd grade after school class.  I don’t know why but during the lesson, I realized that I have not done enough to help differentiate activities for students with special needs. Non-special education teachers only briefly learn about taking care of these special needs students, but I can’t honestly remember any TESOL training that mentions this subject at all. Why hasn’t this subject been instructed in my TESOL training?

This week, a number of students tested every ounce of my patience. On Tuesday, students started to draw all over the desks and some got up and walked out of my room during the middle of a lesson. Today, a student couldn’t stop making disrupting noises during a reading activity. And to compound everything, their low-level of English creates a major roadblock in communicating any instructions. I really wonder what my special students think about English class and if they are gaining anything from attending. I often feel like I’m babysitting or talking to moving walls. I often spend so much time worrying about planning lessons for the mainstream students that I often forget and ignore the students that need special help. What have I done to help these students? Have I done anything to make English more enjoyable? Right now I have no clue, and I’m at a loss.