Strengths:
- I feel that I identified an useful area of vocabulary to focus on at a level suitable for the students in the class. Most were familiar with the meaning of the vocabulary, but had not met the particular collocations we explored.
- Overall, the students were able to use the vocabulary to structure the role play interviews with some success.
- I felt the students enjoyed the interview role play, remained focused and were interested in the topic of the class.
- I felt that the matching exercise and the subsequent practice enabled me to identify problems with the vocabulary. I felt the dialogue exercise enabled the students to feel uncertain about pronunciation, which led to greater focus and attention when completing the choral and individual drilling.
- While my plan was slightly over ambitious, I feel that there was enough flexibility built into the activity so I could ensure we had time for reflection at the end of the class. Asking the students to express confidence in the activity on a scale of 1 to 5 allowed me to identify problems and set some remedial homework related to the classwork.
- The activity allowed me to test and identify the definite need for further reinforcement work on the present perfect simple as a means of discussing experience. The students had met this grammar for the first time in class during the week and it was important for me to get some idea if students would be able to use it.
Weaknesses:
- Several times in the lesson I glossed the meanings of words or didn’t give sufficient opportunity or time for students to check meaning or explore the vocab. I feel that this was either because I was rushing to ensure we got through the plan or because I didn’t want to bog the lesson down in too much front led teacher talk. Was there enough context provided by matching exercise? Perhaps, but there were other pieces of vocabulary that could have been better grounded by contextualisation. I need to train my students better in contextualising new language quickly.
- Some of my task setting and task plenary lacked clear instruction. Some of the students did not immediately understand the role play. The feedback on the task was approached differently in the two groups. This resulted in one group feeding back far quicker that the other group. I then rushed the second group who were negotiating an agreement on which candidate was better. This stage could have been better structured with a post interview pro-forma and a reflection.
- Overall I felt the lesson revolved a little too much around me.
Ben Beaumont responded:
You’ve certainly given a useful summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the lesson, David. I think it’s always going to be difficult to get away from being the centre of attention, especially when language is being presented and you’re clarifying it for learners. The key thing is to be aware of it and to try and maximise learner involvement wherever possible.
As well as considering what went wrong, it’s good to see you thinking of solutions to implement to help prevent these problems from happening again, e.g. the post-interview pro-forma. A good strategy to adopt. By continuing to be specific about problems encountered in the lesson and being a little more specific in terms of actions (what strategies do you have for helping your learners contextulise language more quickly?)
This is a good Stage 1 evaluation. Develop your reflection for your Stage 2 by ensuring you make at least one link to theory (ELT or generic) to support your comments, either justifying your techniques (method or approach) or for suggestions about how you will implement something new for your next observation.
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