We’re almost at the finish line! Woo!
Our ninth class went smoother than butter, the energy was there, the students were participating, interacting, and were fully engaged in our lesson. What a complete contrast to our eighth hour. We ended up using all of our filler activities for the first time ever, which helped in keeping a nice upbeat tempo. Here’s the thing that needs to be addressed if I want these reflections to be completely transparent: our level 2 student wasn’t in class that day. Ken and I had built a lesson plan that would cater to the needs of our higher-level students as well as our lower-level student. We were all set to create a breakout room where I would help our level 2 with the activities, but since they didn’t come to class, the comprehension and assimilation speed increased unexpectedly. It took us by surprise, and we even finished right on time.
We taught our students about reading strategies: skimming and scanning. For our warm-up, Ken had the idea of discussing how the students already used them in their L1 and that the objective of the class was to practice it in English. We started off by explaining the strategies and recognizing which one is used in which contexts. We assessed their comprehension with a quick activity, which they all passed seamlessly. We then moved on to an easy classroom exercise where the students had to use the strategies in a quick manner, and finished our main activities by increasing the difficulty with a race where they had to skim and scan through a 3-page newspaper article (implementing Krashen’s i+1 theory). We were doing so well with time that we had to include our filler activity: a word-search with keywords related to our teaching. We finished the class with a feedback survey that they had to complete before leaving and the result was actually very short and sweet! I felt incredibly proud of the relationship I’ve developed with them in only nine classes.
Having smaller groups has its pros and cons, they’re easier to assess and manage, but developing the skills necessary for group work is very limited to impossible. If we had a group of 20 students for this lesson plan, we’d need to implement group work, come up with unbiased ways to select the groups and mould the questions for group discussions, we’d also rely on peer correction and pair up the students.
It was a shame that our level 2 student wasn’t there, I think it would have been beneficial for them to have learned about the reading strategies.
