This week I tried out a new lesson plan this week. I felt much more organized than usual so writing it down did make a difference for me. This week, I tried to get students to work in groups though out the class rather than just in the group work activities. In fact I tried to set up my lesson with that in mind. For example, I started with a warm up activity asking about the students Membership Training last week but instead of going TSST and chaining it like I usually do, I wrote up the question to dual code. Then I elicited possible answers from students and used that to write up the structure of possible answers. Then I got them come up with an appropriate follow up question and an answer to that. Then I modeled it with a random student once and then turned it over to the groups to practice the structure together.
In other activities, I had students rely on each other to find answers to questions. For example, I took questions about the dialog we were studying but instead of answering the questions myself, I simple wrote them all up and told the groups to find an answers among themselves. I then had each group to answer one of the questions they had posed. They also had to explain it in English rather than give me a Korean translation which I would normally accept if I knew the word. (Which I often do, because when you repeat a lesson as often as I do, you pick up the Korean translation of trouble vocabulary pretty easily.)
All in all, this week the lesson went quite well. I had good participation, a little bit better than last week, so I feel like the classes are getting used to my style and are making steady progress. The one problem, I noticed this week was how much the class schedule depends on student efficiency in interaction activities. About half my classes couldn't finish the final activity because of time pressure. In 2 cases, I had to skip the final activity because the previous activities went on too long. Perhaps, with more practice lesson planning I can avoid having this happen in future, though to tell you the truth I didn't actually include timing in my original lesson plan which I probably should do next time.
In the past I had a lot of timing issues too. I recently discovered that like many things in life 'less is more'. Recently I started stream lining my lesson plans in attempt to get quality learning and language production rather than quantity so that the students don't get overwhelmed and end up retaining nothing. It seems that this week you learned a similar lesson.
ReplyDeletep.s. why did you post 'The Cellist of Sarajevo'?
I posted it as a salute to Vedran Smajlović. At the end of chapter 17 in the Harmar textbook it explains a reading activity using an interesting group of articles to jigsaw meaning. "The Cellist of Sarajevo" is the music inspired by the guy mentioned in those articles, Vedran Smajlović. He basically went out into the middle of an active war zone and for 22 consecutive days played cello in protest to the killings of innocents. That, my man, is sheer defiance at it's most ballsy!
DeleteI only ask because that is the activity that Juanita and I will be co-teaching on Saturday. I was worried that there was some misunderstanding about assigned reading activities.
ReplyDeleteLook forward to seeing it.
ReplyDelete