Reflections, A Week of New Strategies in the Classroom

So this week presented some challenges and successes as I began to incorporate in my classes what I have learned from STG.  I decided that I would concentrate on planning and leading lessons that were more dialogic than in the past.  This came with the obvious challenges a teacher expects to face in a content based class where the syllabus requires that student be passive receivers of information.  If I were to rely on the curriculum created by my school, I would have classes of purely monologic discourse as described by Xie.  I changed things up a bit in order to create a new classroom environment in which students are expected and encouraged to speak. I worked on my own patience and allowed for longer response time.  I asked more open-ended questions that required student elaboration.  I tried not to be obstructive, but constructive in my teacher talk, as suggested by Walsh.  Overall, I tried to allow the students to use their English with the hopes that they will better understand the language.

In one content based class, the students had to read a passage on the winter season.  Having taught the pre-requisite of this book, I was not impressed by the reading passage.  The language was far below their level and offered no challenge for the students.  This worked to my advantage, however.  The students and I quickly went through the compulsory routine of the book lesson before I introduced my own activity.  After drawing a Venn diagram on the board, I asked students to tell me what they knew about American Christmas and how it differed from Korean Christmas.  Student participation was great; students were interested in sharing their culture and inquisitive about my own.  The lesson ended with a white board full of information that was almost entirely produced by student statements or as a result of student questions.

In another class, I concentrated on turn taking and voice.  I have a really shy female student in a lower level class.  I'll call her R.  Often her best friend in the class attempts to speak for R.  I always discourage this and seek information from R when she has been addressed.  I noticed that R's best friend was not in the class on Friday.  So, when I asked R how she was feeling, she replied that she was sad.  Although, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that she was sad because her friend wasn't there, I resisted the desire to express this assumption.  I asked R to explain why she was sad and her response was not at all what I expected.  Friday was the birthday holiday for the school that both R and her best friend attend.  R was upset because while her best friend was at Lotte World, R's mother had forced her to attend all of her academy classes.  I was happy for myself and for R.  By giving R more response time and scaffolding when necessary R was able to express her full thought and I got to hear a much better story than what I'd hastily assumed.