Grandpa Kevan

After the disaster that was my warm-up demo it has taken me many moons to get the courage to post again on the blog.
I have been teaching since 1990 and I realize I am out of date like expired cheese.
On the upside, after that demo, I have nowhere to go but up.

The first area that changed in my teaching was my turn taking routine. It was a start but only a small part, I now realize, of what I need to alter in my teaching style. Instead of always calling upon students to answer a question or read a passage I now engage in invitations to bid and especially invitations to reply. Since I have changed this part of my teaching I find that most students are keen to randomly shout out answers and participate. If someone is quiet I still try to involve them by asking a simple question to give them courage.
One thing I am really good at, in my humble opinion, is making a good classroom atmosphere. I clean my classroom one or two times per week. My windows are so clean everyone marvels at the view of the forest outside. I am also very friendly and I always ask students "How are you?" and if they are ill I provide healthy teas or natural medicine like Vitamin C. I bring this up because I think that my good classroom atmosphere will allow me to challenge the students more, and to change my teaching style without any negative repurcussions. With the change in turn-taking I already feel more energy in the classroom.

I will now outline some other areas that I need to improve on based on my self-reflection. This was of course caused by the dreadful demo. I might be old - hence the Grandpa Kevan - but I can make more than just one change (turn taking).

In the education department during my university days we were taught many things such as using pair work and group work in the class and moving away from a teacher-centered classroom. Classroom management was a common area of discussion as well. Being creative and coming up with new ideas and/or adapting old ones to fit your style and your classroom were also addressed. However, I do not remember much discussion about, or any at all, regarding activating schema and managing transitions between the activities in a lesson. Brainstorming was big and we did learn a lot about using it to warm-up a class. It is a form of activating schema but there are many other ways to get prior knowledge out of students. A teacher cannot brainstorm every class as it would get repetitive and boring. So, as you can see, clearly activating the students' scehma is something I really need to work on and incorporate into a lesson. I have already tried activating the students' schema in some lessons. I usually ask a few questions or make a statement, intending to get a response, that will lead them to the lesson's topic. It is something I definitely need to practice more as so far it is hit and miss. With words or target language it is working. For example, I wanted to introduce them to the word whooper. In the past I would have just given them the word and defintion. Last week I did not. First, I asked the class if they knew what a whooper was. Someone answered that it was a Burger King hamburger. I asked them whether it was big or small. Several said that it was a big hamburger. Then I asked them what a lie called a whooper could be. A few students answered that it was a big lie. If they had been unable to answer I would have given the hint: is a whooper a big or small lie? It was certainly fun going through the process.

I also need to try to just give verbal directions in my speaking classes for the pair and group activities. Too often I give a handout with the written directions and go over them with the class. After that I always do a model but maybe I should just model and give the directions right away. By using different MIC techniques such as gestures (which I know I can do), visuals, rephrasing, repeating and some ICQs I can get the students ready to do the assigned activity. Last week I realized that my directions were often too formal and official sounding, not common spoken discourse. Over the next few weeks, in class and the TESOL course, I hope to get better at giving natural directions. I probably will still use "please" a lot as this is common teachers' discourse in Canada. Heck, we say sorry when others bump into us.

Lastly, introducing vocabulary. I am trying to get them to give me the defintions for some words by putting the word on the whiteboard and asking them if they know the definition. Sometimes they know the correct definition right away and other times I need to ask questions or make a statement to lead them to the answer. If I tell them the definition I ask many CCQs to make sure they fully understand the word/collocation and I ask many students (not just one).

This post has been cathartic for me as I am finally saying what I have been thinking for weeks. Now, I feel I am ready for more than just a token transformation. Thanks blog :)

Student Centered Speaking Lesson

Every second Friday at my workplace we have something called TOPIC BASED DISCUSSION.
It used to be on Monday mornings, which is a much better time for deep classroom discussions such as garbage/recycling and great leaders (some of my past topics). As Friday afternoon is often Freaky Friday with the kids and Fatigued Friday with the adults I decided to try something different.
This lesson with done with my homeroom, which is eight English Teachers from Jeollanamdo.
I wrote the following instructions on the board:
1. The class will choose a topic for discussion. "What topic would you like to discuss?"
2. Each student will write one question onto the piece of paper (supplied by the instructor) related to the topic.
3. The teacher will collect all the questions and put them into a tin.
4. Then five students will each select a question for class discussion. We will pick the questions one at a time and then talk.
5. Decide if we want to talk in pairs, groups or together as a class.
6. Chat time.

I decided that I would choose one student to suggest a topic and see if we could get class agreement (consensus) on the topic. One could also use invitations to bid and invitations to reply to get a topic as well. The original topic chosen was food but after some further discussion it was changed to homeroom cafe (Is this dialogic discourse?).
The class choose to talk about the topic and the five chosen questions as a class (together).
I used individual nominations to select the questions. Sadly , this seems to be a default pattern for me and I need to open it up to invitations to bid and reply more often. I have started doing this more in class combined with individual nominations during this week (March 31st-April 4th) compared to other weeks this semester. Each student who choose a question read it to the class.
The one good thing that came out of this class was that after the question was asked I stood back a bit and let the students take control of the discussion. As I familiar with my homeroom after almost four weeks, and I see them everyday I felt that giving them control of the discussion was an example of student initiated interaction. Why? They asked each other follow-up questions, and used some of the eliciting functions such as: confirming, agreeing and committing. My role was to decide when to move onto the next question if I felt the discussion was wavering. However, as the discussion was so good and animated we only did three questions in the end.
I should add that the questions for the most part were referential. I had no idea what the students would say. Maybe only my question was open: "Who is the best photographer in the class?" and the question was thrown back into the tin by me and the students. Too simple.