As I consider our
class teaching polterabend, I have observed both positive things and
things that may need some tweaking. Because I'm a positive person
I'll start with what I think went well. On teacher talk I felt we
had a very dynamic cast. With Evalyn and Daniel as my partners, they
both brought a very proactive mindset which went a long way in making
up for some of the weaknesses in our implementation. I thought Evalyn
spoke in a very confident and engaging way while Daniel was as
entertaining as usual with very expressive body language. For my
part, I thought I stayed focused, and remained cool even
though I felt somewhat flustered by the time pressure I was facing
when I finally started my set.
In terms of our
cultural objective, I think we did quite well. Each of us presented
our parts as stages of Moran's cultural learning pretty clearly. The
information we presented followed the model predictably. The
assigned homework was intended to cover the last stage (Knowing ones self) as you
suggested. In addition as the cultural event we were describing is a fairly
specific take on a widespread tradition, there really wasn't much danger of stereotyping. In fact, the reasons I gave for why
Germans practice polterabend are all easy to relate to in a general way.
(Well, from a from a western perspective at least.)
That said, there
were some problems. In terms of how well we achieved our objective
teaching the TLC, I would say that each of us achieved “an
objective” rather than “the objective”. Each, of us took a
different approach that I thought could be interesting in a real
teaching environment. Unfortunately, none of us knew exactly what
each other was going to do except in a general way. (In fact, we
merged our ppts together just before ICC class) So in that sense I
felt that each of us taught a lesson that was somewhat self contained
with some unintended overlap. In the end, I think its safe to say
that we each achieved a sub objective which may not have built on
each other in a way that achieved our terminal objective. For
example, neither Daniel nor I reinforced the vocabulary that Evalyn
was focusing on. And neither Evalyn nor Daniel presented the exact
same variation of the TLC that I did, which would have made a world
of difference for the focused practice I had in mind for my pyramid
activity. In short, a lack of cohesion may have confused our
students. And I saw one comment to that effect in the feedback.
This lack of
cohesion also created some difficulties especially for me coming in last.
Our pacing definitely put me under pressure. With the TLC, we could
have streamlined a lot of what we did to create more time. So that
could have been better. And as I mentioned before, each of us almost
taught an independent lesson, so overall it was quite unbalanced
with a lot of overlap between stages of the lesson. Daniel's role
play activity for example probably should have come at the end in the
production stage where as I was still getting students to do
controlled practice, in my set. But I consider these problems as
stemming form a lack of teamwork rather than weakness in our
individual teaching pedagogy. No doubt had any of us had the floor
for the full 15 minutes, the lessons would have been much better
organized. In short, even though we do each have pedagogical
weaknesses, I don't think the problems we experienced in our demo
reflects them in a entirely accurate way.
Finally, I would
like to reflect on how our lesson catered to our student's need. The
lesson plan we made was student centered in that we planned a lot of
activities for students to participate in. On the other hand it was
hard to see that because we had didn't really have time to implement
the activities we planned. In my case I was hoping to actually do
the pyramid activity rather than just to announce that that we did
it. But the intent in our planning was certainly there. In terms of
context, I thought that doing the role play was a great way of
providing context... but maybe not for the TLC that we planned! The
kind of TLC that would be useful at a wedding party is somewhat
unrelated to the TLC needed to teach about Polterabend. So if we were doing this lesson in real life I think we would have taught the TLC
necessary for this role play in the previous lesson.
All in all, despite our difficulties I felt my team members did very well. And would like to thank them for all the hard work they put into this lesson. If you're reading this team. Well done!
