My best lesson- Lynette

I consider this lesson one of the better ones not because it was anything fancy or elaborate, but because it was a fruitful lesson which resulted in the students' learning. Although I did not really have to follow a very rigid scheme of work, everything had to be geared towards preparing students for the exams. This lesson was on writing an introduction of a narrative. After having read and marked the students' essays, it was clear that the students needed to adopt more varied approches to writing an introductory paragraph as many were still using the primary school cliche of "Ring, the telephone rang..."

These students are Secondary Two, Express stream. Mixed ability with about three relatively good writers and three international students who are very weak in the language. The students are well-behaved, they generally do whatever they are told, however they are not very expressive.

In this lesson, the students had to identify the different types of introductions for narrative essays (beginning the story with eg. speech and dialogue, action, flashback, a quotation/proverb, background information). The next objective was that that they had to write an introductory paragraph using an assigned type of introduction in groups of four. The entire class was given the same title.

Basically, I started the lesson with a few movie clips which featured different types of introductions and asked the class to comment on how the movie began and its effect on viewers. I then linked it to writing the introductions of their essays. I gave the class a handout which consisted of different introductory paragraphs and asked them to match which introduction corresponded with which type of introduction. Explicit explanation then followed. After that, students had to work in groups to write an introductory paragraph with the assigned type of introduction that had been covered earlier. As there were two groups working on each type of introduction, the sharing session was fruitful as the class could hear all the five types of introductions and could also compare their introduction with the other group that was assigned the same type. The work produced by each group was very commendable and they were visibly proud of their introductions in their presentations.

Personally, I learnt that many students actually appreciate the lesson when it is geared towards examination skills and knowledge. I tried fun games and activities in previous lessons but I realised that the more proficient students actually got bored in those lessons because they could have felt under-challenged, or perhaps they simply preferred something more exam-focused and less 'fluffy'. It helped me realise that I had to know and understand the different learning styles and preferences of the different classes. It was also important that I did not give the entire class exactly the same activity because most students tend to get restless after listening to presentations with similar content.