Reflection 2

A case of effective language teaching

Sarah was sitting on her desk, while the students were reading in silence and writing their predictions about the books. After the reading activity, the teacher asks for silence and she gives them some points if they don't speak while she is talking, so if they have 25 points they will be able to have a free class to do an activity that they prefer. When the students are ready to listen, Sarah starts giving some instructions about a future homework that the students have to do. After finishing, Sarah says "I'm too bored, let's do it something more interesting", and a new activity starts, Sarah put an extract of a movie about pantomime and the idea is that the students can guess what the characters are eating because in the movie, they are just simulating that they are eating something, all the children are in silence trying to watch carefully the movements of each character, and they write their guesses on their notebooks. Then, it's time to share answers, many hands are raised, and the students take turns to talk and to explain why they think that they are right on their guesses, what the clues are that gave them the answers. While the students are sharing their own aswers, Sarah gives the students that are participating actively, little pieces of papers with messages, on these papers say: "good work", "good job", "awesome", when the students recieve these messages they put their names on it; at the end of the class, I could see the purpose of these papers, the teacher makes a raffle every day with the messages that the children got during the class, if they were participating a lot, they can obtain more papers and they have more possibilities of being winners, for this class there were two winners, so they got the prize, and it was a candy. The class finished, and the students were really happy after that, they had gained new points to reach the 25, and some of them had won prizes.


I really like the classroom that the students are, the teacher told us that they decided what to put on the walls because the idea is that they feel comfortable; one of the posters that is on the wall is about an agreement that the students made, and they had to sign this agreement, this is about the behaviour that the students have to show in class. Also, one thing that I like is that they use "play do", when they finish an activity or while the teacher is reading, they create predictions with it on what they think will happen next in the book, they really enjoy playing with this. The points that they win as a group, are on the whiteboard, so they can see if they are close to obtain a free class, they really like it because in a free class they can decide what they want to do.
The class that was descripted before was really meaningful for me because it was so different from the classes that I have observed, and it was very dinamic, the teacher was always doing new things and the students were interested in all of the activities that they had to do. To give papers with messages motivate them because they know that they are doing well.
I think this is a student centered class, the teacher is always worried about the needs that the students have, and I know that the students enjoy being there because one of them said once "you're one of my favourite teacher"; also, this kind of comment motivate the teacher to continue doing well and to be more creative, so the students will be interested in every lesson.
I had always wondered which effective strategies to engage our students can we use, and to make them that enjoy the class; now I know some simple things that are meaningful and can motivate my future students.