Hedley, Texas TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

The two lessons shown in this unit were very different from one another, mostly because of the attitude of the teacher. In the first lesson he is speaking too fast to be understood. The students are probably apprehensive because the teacher is becoming easily frustrated with their lack of understanding, they might be nervous to get reprimanded for answering wrong. In the first lesson, the teacher is discouraging to the students. For example around 14 minutes into the video the way he is monitoring the students doing the worksheet, he is being disruptive and saying things like "you've done nothing". He is also acting careless when grading the worksheet with the class because he does not stop to make sure everyone understands the right answer and just puts check marks on the board if he hears at least one student got it right. Another example of both carelessness and discouragement, is in the activity at 19m 50s he is not keeping score of the teams and at the end names one that he "likes better" to be the winner. The second lesson is completely different. The teacher approaches the students with a more friendly demeanor and makes sure to learn each of their names at the beginning. One part I liked about his leading the first engage phase was that he encouraged a sense of humor instead of telling students that they were flat out wrong. Like when he said he liked the idea of playing volleyball in a restaurant. He used a lot more fine tuned actions and gestures to illustrate what he was saying and to transition to other parts of the lesson. He gave students a chance to figure out the answers to his gap-fill sentences instead of giving the answers right away. The teacher took care to give point out an example of how the word restaurant may be pronounced differently than it is spelled. He paid attention to what articles students used when building a sentence and helped them work through whether the sentence called for a definite or indefinite article. I thought he had a good way to illustrate which subjects use "have to" and "has to" by drawing a chart and filling it out minimally. In the second lesson the teacher was much more clear when he called on students for what kind of answers he was looking for, although it felt like he was still talking too fast at times and seemingly called on the same students a lot. The teacher's actions and tone of voice really set the precedent for both lessons. In the first lesson his tone was very intimidating, as though he was impatient with the students and apathetic about their learning. In the second lesson it felt more like he was happy to hear all the answers they gave as long as they were participating, and that way even if they made errors he was patient and helped them work through it.