Second Classroom Observation

※ Instrctor: Pamela
※ 2007/5/21, 1:00 ~ 1:50 pm, O-106, Language Center, NCU.

Today was the second time for me to observe Pamela’s teaching. Pamela chatted with students and reminded them some assignments in the beginning if the class. I think it’s important and effective to "warm up". By doing so, students can not only feel the comfortable atmosphere in the class but also have time to get ready to pay attention to the teacher.

About five minutes later, Pamela played the CD, which is about a passage from the textbook. Since the passage is long, some of students did not really listen carefully to the CD. After listening to the CD, students were asked to separate into groups to discuss the questions related to the passage. Pamela separated students randomly by asking them to number off from one to eleven. Then, the people who counted the same number would in the same groups. From my point of view, separating students randomly in this kind of small discussion is appropriate, but it’s very likely to cause chaos because students would not remember each other’s number. What Pamela wanted students to do was that they had to go through all the discuss questions (sentences), and then she would assign every group to take charge of two questions after later. I keep this “strategy” in mind because I think it can make students to read all of the questions. If teacher directly ask students to take a look at the assigned questions, students would tend to neglect other questions because they think those questions are not their business.
Pamela allowed students to use either English or Chinese to do their presentations, I think this is the main reason why students use Chinese during the discussion. Since the students had the “privilege” to use Chinese, I did not hear English in their discussion. Almost at the end of the discussion (about 3 or 4 minutes left), teacher assigned the two questions that each group was responsible for.
And each group had to choose one person to do the report.

Oh ~time flies! 50 minutes passed by. Today’s lesson gives me some new ideas about the field project. Though there is lots of uncertainty about my project, I wish I can turn my disorganized thoughts into a real project! Oh ~ I must to !!! well, I really need some muses.