This will be about my best lesson conducted.
A lot of it was influenced by the presence of:
(1) The Principal;
(2) HOD English; and
(3) My CT,
all of whom were sitting at the back of the classroom. My P makes it a practice to try to sit in as many trainees' lessons as possible, and I was one of the two unfortunate / fortunate in hindsight persons.
First I'll cut and paste from my lesson plan the basic background.
| Understanding Goals Students will be able to understand: - The process of picking points out for a 160-word summary from a comprehension passage, including: o What to include, and o What to leave out; - What is required of a good summary answer through an exploration of the marking rubrics; and - How points for a summary can be linked into a coherent paragraph. Performances of Understanding Students will be able to: - Fill out key words, blanked out from the marking scheme, for: o Content o Use of own words o Use of English. - Assist the teacher in picking relevant points out from a comprehension passage; and - Link a given list of points up into a coherent paragraph (in pairs). |
| Profile/ Prior knowledge of students Students belong to the top band of PSLE graduands, and have no problems with basic expression in English. Some students do face problems expressing themselves in the correct tone and register, appropriate for examination conditions. The first 3 weeks of Term 2 were spent on report writing, and this is their second lesson on summary writing. The first lesson of summary writing was spent on activation of students’ schema, and involved a K-W-L activity on the topic of pet-rearing. This topical approach allowed students to ease into comprehension / summary passages of ‘O’-level difficulty. |
Handouts consisted of a list of linking words, step-by-step guides to summary writing, and a 'model summary' prepared by the teacher, as well as marking rubrics for the O Levels.
Why I say this was good
Classroom management was never an issue at all, even though this was the most ill-reputed class in the entire school, and probably one of the most ADHD classes I've ever taught in my few attachments. The P (with a fierce reputation) sitting at the back put paid to all classroom management issues, and that paved the way for a very smooth lesson with students volunteering answers readily.
And therein the learning point or dilemma that came to my mind: All along I thought that a healthy sense of rapport with students was useful, and aided learning a lot. Now I'm starting to doubt that, and somehow I think it'd also be workable if a teacher is really really fierce, strict, no-nonsense, yet able to wield the attention of the students. With a silent classroom, and having them remember what they were taught, failing which they'd be in deep, shall we say, excrement. Fear though it is, doesn't that ultimately help them achieve the objective of getting good O level grades, which is what we're aiming for? So does it matter if they hate us in the end, as long as they get good grades?
Valuable lesson-specific sharing points
In terms of valuable sharing points, one thing that got rammed home in TP for me was the provision of materials for students to write/copy notes on, as well as a 'model' (preferably arrived at through teacher modelling). As it was a formal observation by the P, my CT was probably even more uptight than I was, and took the effort to go through the handouts and slides I prepared. I took the easy step of blanking out words from my powerpoint slides for the students to fill in as they went along, but he pointed out that filling in PPT slides is not that user-friendly, and hence I came up with new fresh handouts based on the powerpoint slides.
Likewise, for the model summary at the end of the lesson, it was an important handout to reinforce what they have learnt, and to provide a proper learning model for them when they revise for the exams. This would probably work well due to the nature of the school, where the students will start mugging seriously nearer the exams (and totally forget what happened in class in the meantime). Not so sure if the provision of such 'models' will be as beneficial to students who won't be bothered to look at the notes ever again -- so I guess something will need to be done with the model answer, as opposed to just distributing it and telling them to read it. (For subsequent lessons, I did give them model answers and ask them to pick out the points in the paragraph, and tell me what was good about it. Useful.)
What could have been done better
This came out of my debriefing by the HOD. He noticed that the students were getting restless by the time I started working on the 3rd paragraph of the passage during my modelling (of how to pick out points). He suggested that I could have varied it by getting students to carry on and then discussing the answers.
During the debrief with the P, he pointed out that I could have started with getting the boys to buy in the value of summary, something which he emphasised to the students before he left the class (he took 10min to tell them that summary is important in real life). True enough, I did that with the Report Writing unit, but neglected that for the summary.
Yep okie that's about what I have for now. Time to read your posts =p
No comments:
Post a Comment