It’s a pleasure having Mr. Patterson providing me with instructional support and coaching. He has some good feedback for me especially his experience working in various programs and educational institutions serving minority students. One challenge this week was getting students to use targeted language in the activities I had planned for the week. When I was watching the classes I noticed that many of my students tend to speak Spanish in groups when they get into hot discussions about a topic. In role-plays or information gap activities it was easier for them to keep speaking English because they used the English prompts and that seemed to get them started the right way. I asked Mr. Patterson about this and he suggested I adopt the idea of using some form of language police in group work (one learner makes sure that everybody speaks English). The “language police” received a badge (printed and laminated) from the teacher and was responsible that his/her group would speak English in this lesson.
Also Mr. Patterson and I agreed that we would not ever correct students’ mistakes when they tried to express something difficult in English. Many of them make a lots of mistakes –I would let them finish and then just summed up the request/ or comment in correct English. I believe my students should never feel embarrassed about their mistakes. The goal is to get them to become naturally articulate in expressing themselves in English so it’s important for them to feel that they had communicated their ideas successfully. I think this is really important, otherwise the learners will not want to speak in front of the class.
Mr. Patterson also offered me advice on a classroom management strategy to maximize my students during a lesson. This was one of the most difficult things for me in my first teaching hours. It helped me a lot to use name-cards for the students, because I could call their names if somebody wasn’t working. I also noticed that it is difficult to interrupt a class when they are working in groups. My students can get quite noisy and I didn’t want to shout into the class in order to be heard. Mr. Patterson showed me how he used the two-finger signal. When the two finger signal of the right hand is raised it means “Please listen to me.” and raised the signal as I have done. The students know that this means that they should stop whatever they are doing in order to get some short instructions or information. Whoever notices this also raises their arm and spreads the information. It worked really well and within half a minute everybody seemed to be listening. I was glad to bring this strategy to my classroom.
-Marcos
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