Stage 3

In this lesson I looked to develop the ‘focus on learning’ that I made a main aim in stage 0 of this reflection blog. In the first observed lesson I asked the students how they felt about their oral performance during the lesson and gave them some advice on improving their speaking. From reading texts such as William’s Inside the Black Box (2001) my interest in student self-assessment has developed. Therefore this lesson included elements of both peer and self-assessment as part of the structure of the lesson. I will focus this reflection on these elements of the class:

Strong points of the lesson

  -   At the start of the speaking task students wrote down a range of realistic aims for the task they were just about to complete.

  -   Task-repetition ensured that students had several opportunities to experiment using the interactive strategies with different partners. This generally meant that when students reflected on performance they recognised they had developed their interactive strategies during the lesson.

  -   Students felt a clear sense of satisfaction reflecting on success. The task had allowed them to experience success.

  -   The peer observation element allowed students to glimpse the task from an examiners perspective. This was likely to, in Williams’ words give students a better sense of the ‘desired goal’ (2001:7). Students spent significant time discussing and analysing how successfully their peers had met the target.

Issues to consider:

  -  I found that I was slightly pushed for time to introduce vocabulary then organise a task and give time for reflection inside a single lesson.  Therefore the formative assessment cycle probably requires more time for the students to reflect and put into action new language they have met.

  -  Some students wrote quite negative reflections on their speaking performance in their student diaries. This was despite competent or good speaking performance. In other words the students have an overly negative mind set. They need to recognise the positive aspects of their own language production. This will require a better sense of the exam speaking criteria. I believe the peer-reflection  completed as part of the class should help students to do this, but it will take time for students to familiarise themselves with the exam requirements.

  -  The class was focused on interactive strategies for the speaking exam. To some extent it was easy for student to give each other feedback on this area. I need to consider how I can encourage better self and peer reflection on the more opaque aspects of exam criteria such as cohesion or discourse management.  The obvious way to do this would be to provide models of good and bad student performance on each of these criteria and get the learners to analyse this.

In conclusion, this lesson has provided me with a better understanding of the practical advantages and challenges of using assessment for learning with students.   

Stage 4

In this lesson I was aiming to work on areas of my teaching that had arisen in my second observation. In this observation one of the main issues I identified with my lesson was a lack of clear stage aims in the planning of the class. This led to a convoluted lesson where the stages and student output were not sufficiently clear. My mentor had suggested that I should get ‘back to basics’ and ensure that both stage aims and interaction patterns were added to the plan. I feel this has been a useful process that enabled me to identify more clearly the staging and organisation of the class.

The observed class was a task-based lesson where students had to find out from their partners the reason why someone was injured. This required them to retell a story they had been given as a cartoon. A decision I faced practically was the introduction of vocabulary to tell the story. I felt that if the vocabulary had been pre-taught it would have spoilt the story-telling element of the class.

Nevertheless, The major issue I found with the class was that students lacked some key vocabulary items that they needed to retell the story well. These included key verbs such as ‘slipped’ or ‘fell’ and key nouns such as ‘ladder’. Looking back on the lesson I should have definitely provided a stage where students had the opportunity to check and practice this language before setting out on the task. Perhaps this could have been done on the worksheets I gave them by asking them to match the vocabulary to the cartoon images. However, I would still need to focus the student on pronunciation and irregular features in some of the verbs. In other words pre-teaching would have required some teacher led demonstration and practice.

Does this mean that the task-based approach an unsuitable way to get the learners telling stories? Or would a teacher led pre-teaching session have slowed down the natural pace of the lesson.  Reflecting on the lesson I feel that I did try to provide what Willis describes as a ‘facilitating task’ to help students with the vocabulary, but this was not thorough enough.

My mentor commented on the lesson that an issue he noticed in both of the observations was that I tended to add too much to the lesson. This could be confusing to students who didn’t always understand where they were in the lesson and how it contributed to the eventual goal.

As a summative reflection this seems important. During the course we have explored and come across a range of approaches to lesson structures. The danger when using these as outlined above can be adding too many ingredients, leading to oversights on key areas. In this lesson I needed to give clearer lexical support  to students so they could complete the task. In general I need to make sure that I am working through the lesson from the students’ perspective to identify the difficulties they will face with any particular task.

These issues relate back to one of my original comments in my stage 0 blog. I stated there that I wanted to ensure that I focused on the essential knowledge students need as part of preparation for my lessons. One of the main things I learn from this is that, even through I have developed my knowledge of teaching pedagogy through the course, it is vital to stay focused on the essential elements of teaching. Schon suggests that our learning is ‘iterative’, repetition of the same or similar actions gives us a functional understanding of how to teach. Reflection on my observations demonstrates that I am returning to the same key issues again and again, hopefully refining my understanding of my teaching practice.

The strongest point of the observed lesson was that my plan included elements of task-repetition. This meant that students who initially lacked vocabulary, had the opportunity to enquire about key words, understand them in the context of the story, then try to use them on the second repetition. I felt that the material stimulated the students and provided the opportunity to focus on a number of interesting vocabulary items such as ‘he decided to’, ‘she didn’t notice that...’ There is good potential to develop these in the next class.

So in conclusion while I do feel the lesson provided a good environment for students to practice language relating to the aim, I need to make sure that I keep paying attention to the parts of the lesson where students will encounter difficulties.