March 23rd, 2018

Mentoring Journal 

 

Entry #4: Post Observation Meeting

​

Planned Questions Post-Observation Meeting:

1. How did you feel about the lesson?

2. How did you feel about the feedback?

 

The conversation about the observation

We chatted via facebook. I had sent him a word doc of my observation notes. I sent him this fb message: Hello! Here are the notes that I took while observing. I typed them up because my handwriting is horrible when I write quickly. It's hard to understand. I thought it would be nice for you to take a look at the grid so that we are both looking at the same thing while talking over video chat tomorrow evening. Also, you could look at what areas you want to focus on, and/or prepare some questions.

I sent him the observation grid with my typed up notes via email prior to our meeting.  

 

Getting started

We started chat – I asked how his week was going. He said pretty good and asked about mine. I responded that I was more relaxed having defended my thesis. I asked if he was done midterms. He said he had two big ones coming up.

 

Getting the mentee to talk about the lesson

I then moved on to the lesson and asked: How did you feel about the lesson?

G: felt he did better, especially comparing what he had done to what his peers had done before him. They had followed the book and didn’t have any communicative activities. He had to peer evaluate a one of his fellow student-teachers. And only had bad things to say. Gabriel mentioned his peer had called out a student on not doing his homework in front of the whole class. G felt this was not okay to do this.

I did not respond to that at this point. I wanted to keep focus on his lesson and what he had done, so I said, “So you were happy about what you did in the lesson. What did you like? What would you do differently?”

G: The lesson wasn’t perfect (don’t remember the details of what he said…)

 

The “intensity” discussion

I wanted more details on how he felt the aspects we had decided to focus observation on: “How did you feel about the feedback on intensity?”

G felt he was a lot less intense in this lesson than he had been before.

I mentioned I felt he was at ease when he had something to do e.g., teach, talk, hand out materials, answer questions. But that when he was monitoring he was less comfortable: moving, pacing, checking things. He seemed more nervous when he didn’t have a concrete task to accomplish.

We then talked about what he meant exactly with intensity. He described how for him it was about his nervousness, described as “a nervous aura”. That he “strangled” his students by being worried and stressed.

We talked about how this was very evident in the first filmed evaluated lesson (HYPERLINK). But we both felt that his was not as intense in this lesson.

We talked about a solution we had discussed for his monitoring intensity of placing chairs so he could be closer to the students and to see if the pacing and not knowing what to do part would improve. I said I noticed he didn’t do it and maybe that was because it didn’t come naturally. He agreed and mentioned the space was different to what we had remembered. There was not enough room for the chairs to be placed where he could see what the learners were doing. I agreed. I suggested he try maybe bending down to the learners level, as he had done when talking one of his fellow student-teachers. He agreed to try.

​

...

​

See the PDF document for the full journal entry.