On Tuesday of this week I was observed by one of my superiors and by some educators from Thailand who wanted to see how incorporated group work into the classroom.
I'm very happy to say that my observation went very well and that I also received some very good suggestions on my teaching. My supervisor gave me some good ideas involving the students doing group work on the board during the beginning of the class. The class is a writing class and starts at 8am in the morning! Not a good time! Doing more group activities involving all the students right away in the morning might help the students wake up a little bit.
I was also given some good ideas involving time usage - I think I need to start assigning an amount of time to certain activities. Usually I just tell the students/groups what needs to be done and then I circulate through the classroom and make sure that everyone is on task. Some groups finish very quickly, while others can easily work for the majority of the class period. If I only gave the students a fixed amount of time I think they might work a little more effeciently.
We did do a lot of group work in Tuesday's class, so I'm glad the Thai teachers chose that day to come. They were really able to see the students working together and presenting their discoveries.
On Thursday we decided to try something new. I'm using film to introduce a persuasive essay, so we watched part of the movie, "What about Bob?" starring Bill Murrey. We discussed portions of the film while we watched it and discussed different topics in the movie that we could use in the essay. It was a fun class and I'm glad we had the opportunity to change things up a little bit.
Well, it was a good week and I feel very encouraged by it.
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