April 3rd, 2018

Mentoring Journal

 

Entry #7: Meeting before Second Evaluated Lesson

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Last Meeting before 2nd Evaluated Lesson – Mentee Led

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Gabriel had sent me the materials he wanted me to look at before hand. The lesson plan (Appendix A) and the handout sheets he was going to use with modifications based on our previous conversation (Appendix B), in which he addressed my suggestion he make the activity on Can you + verb/verb phrase less controlled. I suggested he give them the chunk “I can” and show them in one example how to complete it, for example “I can swim” and then give them the handout with examples of verbs and verb phrases and have them complete the same chunk by selecting a verb or verb phrase to complete it with.

 

We took a look at the changes. I told Gabriel it was great to see that he was moving out of his comfort zone and that the activity looked great.

 

I asked him if there was any feedback point from the lesson plan that he wanted to talk about. He mentioned the comment where I had asked about what the transition between teachers activity would be and he said that they had found the activity. It would be a freeze frame situation. He would drop some pencils and freeze in the act of picking them up. His co-teacher would ask the students whether he should help him, and this would introduce her topic “should/shouldn’t”

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I asked him to remind of the lesson and walk me through what he would do. He said he would be doing 2 truths and a lie as a warmer using the grammar point to be taught “I can/can’t do something.” The teachers would say they can do something and the students would guess who was lying and couldn’t do what they were saying they were doing.

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We talked about how he would go over the vocabulary. He had wanted to maybe do something like a communicative task where the learners went over the vocabulary, but Teresa had suggested he simply give them the handout and tell them to look over it and ask him if they had any questions. Gabriel was not sure why he should do this. It seemed pointless to him. I mentioned it can be a good idea to follow the suggestion made by an evaluator. But Gabriel was not satisfied with this. He wanted a clear reason why to do it. I suggested maybe he could ask Teresa about it and see what she said. He agreed that would be a good idea and he could ask her before the class. I also said maybe she suggested that as an alternative to spending too much time on the vocabulary through a CLT activity.

 

That was all Gabriel wanted to talk about regarding the lesson. He was prepared.

He wanted my advice on giving feedback to his teaching peer. He was not sure how to respond to the Correct Use of English category. He understood it as saying whether the teacher use English that was to the level of the students. I agreed, and added that category could also mean correct use of English, for example in the case of an NNES there may be grammatical errors, and this could be problematic if incorrect English is taught or used in the class.

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He also talked about how to address the category on correcting mistakes. He had not seen the teacher do it and was not sure how to respond to the category. I suggested it might be interesting to think about why there had not been anything to correct. What kind of a lesson, methodology, teaching approach had the other teacher adopted that had not given rise to situation where the students were speaking and therefore potentially making mistakes. Gabriel said this was interesting, but he had already talked about the teaching approach in other sections of the peer evaluation and he felt this might be redundant to talk about it again in this section. I mentioned that another approach could be to talk about how error correction could have been done had there been any, and that this way he could show his theory knowledge – which was his main concern in this category; not being able to connect to theory because there had been no incidents.

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See the PDF document for the full journal entry.