Lindsay Androy ED.

691 July 10th, 2013 Observation of a Sheltered Lesson and Reflection My observation was done in a classroom at the English Language and Culture Institute (ELCI). I was placed in a classroom where the students were working on developing and applying their verb tenses. My initial thought when walking into the classroom is that the teacher was not very prepared for the lesson she was teaching. But with further observation and a follow-up conversation with the teacher, I was able to get a better sense of what her purpose and methods were for teaching. The ELCI is in charge of administering the assessments and providing the curriculum for the teacher, and once I found this information out, I was began to see the lesson from a different perspective. The first thing I would like to discuss is the teachers use of visuals. During the lesson I was observing, each student was provided a book in order to follow along with the teacher. The book provides visuals for every verb being discussed, and the people and activities portrayed in the pictures represented a variety of cultures, not just the typical white-American culture. This is something I noted as being a positive part of the lesson. But I would have liked to see a lot more visuals throughout the classroom, which is something that can be seen in a GLAD classroom (Project GLAD, 2013, p. 4). For this particular lesson plan, the students were working on past, present, and future tenses. The teacher was verbally explaining and giving examples of all three,

but it would have been extremely beneficial for her to include sentence frames on the board for students to use. Also, some of the vocabulary was unfamiliar to the students, so it would have been effective for the teacher to visually introduce new vocabulary words. The next thing I would like to discuss is the use of group work within the class. A classroom environment that values the student, provides authentic opportunities for use of academic language maintains highest standards and expectations for all students, and fosters voice and identity(Project GLAD, 2013, p. 2), which is exactly what I observed in the classroom. As a whole group, the teacher was using the visuals in the book to guide her instruction. But when the students got into groups, she encouraged them to break away from the book and use the past, present, and future tenses to discuss experiences from their own lives. I was honestly shocked at the responses that I began hearing. During whole group discussion, the students were slightly disengaged, which made me think that the verb tenses were a bit above their proficiency level therefore making the activity difficult and frustrating. But when they were given the opportunity to use their life experiences to make connections with the material, their skills immediately improved and they were able to have comprehensible conversations with their partners and groups. As a teacher, the reflection process holds so much importance for the ability to be an effective teacher. Just because a particular method of instruction is working perfectly right now, does not mean it is going to work perfectly all thirty years of your teaching career. According to Gebhard (2005), to truly develop as a teacher, I

needed to be free to explore teaching, and to explore I needed to transcend the idea that development should be based only on the concept of improvement(p.2). I have not yet been in the classroom, so I am still unsure as to exactly what my teaching methods are going to be; but I am very interesting in exploring the use of visuals in the classroom. It seems that even at the secondary level, students are in need of constant reminders, which unfortunately, can take up a lot time in a short class period. If students are provided with visuals, such as word banks, sentence frames, etc throughout the classroom, then it can cut back on the time spent on review. In order to best develop the use of visuals, I think it would be beneficial to observe teachers who use visuals consistently and teachers who rarely use visuals. And although it is important to make most of my observations in a classroom within my content area, it is also important to observe all other content areas. Once I begin teaching full time and using visuals around the classroom, it will be important that I do something such as record my class in order to see how many students are referencing the visuals and which types are used more then others.

Resources: Gebhard, J. (2005). Teacher development through exploration: Principles, ways, and examples. TESL-EJ, 9(2). Available at http://www.kyoto-su.ac.jp/information/teslej/ej34/a4.html "Project GLAD." Project GLAD. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 July 2013. <http://www.projectglad.com/glad.html>.