Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in China? Are you interested in teaching English in Lishui, China? Check out our opportunities in Lishui, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English in your community or abroad! Teflonline.net offers a wide variety of Online TESOL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Here Below you can check out the feedback (for one of our units) of one of the 16.000 students that last year took an online course with ITTT!
To be fair the instructions of this unit made it sound like the first video would be the correct lesson and the second a complete horror and I feared for the second after watching the first. However now that Ive seen them both I understand that the first was just a terrible example of teaching and the second was more what I would expect in a classroom. That being said I simply shook my head at the first video the whole time wondering where on earth this guy graduated from, hoping that was not an example of british teaching.
This unit seemed to be making the point of what makes a good teacher versus a bad one. I learned a lot from this one watching that first video and seeing all the mistakes he was making, and watching the students poor reactions to what he was doing. He did not know all of their names, made no effort to engage them at all before the lesson began, and it felt like he was in a hurry to get out of there and no interested in being there to begin with. The second video was so much better for me since it demonstrated exactly what I expect in a classroom. The teacher was friendly, engaging, had a nice friendly back and forth going on with the students, and everyone in that room seemed to be enjoying themselves.
The lesson was definitely more effective in the second video, and while the task questions wanted to know what I would do to improve on that lesson, I could not think of much beyond standing at the door and greeting them each in turn as they entered the room and asking them how their day had been so far. For me that lesson was a great example of how a teacher should be addressing a classroom of that age and learning level.
In the first, I definitely would have felt confused and unsure of the teacher during that whole lesson, and afterwards I would have felt like I wasted my time in being there. That is not the type of classroom I ever want to be in, let alone put my own students through. The second lesson was more productive, goal oriented while being fun and friendly, and I would have felt happy with my time spent during that class.
I would say that he used a straight arrow lesson type during the first lesson, however I failed to see any engagement phase used, he seemed to go straight into the study phase and stuck with that until the activation phase towards the end. The boomerang style used in the second lesson was easier to pick up and follow after he started with introducing himself and engaging the students from the beginning.
I would say overall I learned a lot of what not to ever do in a classroom from watching that first video, and a lot of inspiration for my teaching style in watching the second.
