ICC Mini Lesson Reflection

My team chose the German cultural practice of Polterabend to explain to the class. The lesson was divided into 3 parts based on Moran’s stages of learning.  Each team member took one aspect of the Cultural Knowings.  Evalyn taught Knowing About, I taught Knowing How, and William taught Knowing Why and Knowing Oneself.  Evalyn showed the Ss pictures of smashed plates and then activated the schema of the Ss by blending these pictures with pictures about marriage and couples.  I believe that our lesson provided unusual cultural information to the class, and as a result was interesting to the Ss.  I presented the Ss with role cards so that gave a brief character summary that guided the Ss towards understanding the different feelings people could have at a Polterabend.  Due to the time constraints the Ss were able to have a short example of plate smashing to experience a cultural behavior. Finally, William asked the Ss to think about the benefits of people having a Polterabend, and then asked the Ss to compare this pre-wedding cultural practice with pre-wedding cultural practices in their country.  This covered all of Moran’s Cultural Knowings and provided the Ss with opportunities to interact and learn about this cultural practice.   

Was the cultural content objective and free of over-generalizations and stereotypes?

I believe the cultural content objective of this lesson was to learn about an interesting cultural practice, but even though the behaviors were strange (smashing plates and having the bride and groom clean it up).  The small c cultural feelings associated to this event were not uncommon to the Ss, and are evident in many cultures around the world. People feel angry over lost love and smash plates to let out aggression.  Marriages have problems and the couple needs to work through them. The mess from the smashed plates is a visual example of problems the couple must work through together.  By cleaning up the mess the couple can feel they are a team and have a feeling of accomplishment.  During the lesson, one student (Michelle) stated that the Greeks have a similar kind of cultural tradition.  I don’t think that the point of the lesson was “Man, these Germans are crazy!”  I think the point of the lesson was here is a strange custom, but it includes small c cultural feelings that all people have.

Was the lesson well-sequenced, paced and balanced?

The lesson was in sequence, starting with Knowing About, then Knowing How, then Knowing Why and finally Knowing Oneself.  I know that the lesson was not properly paced as there were activities that were shortened.  Honestly, it was just a matter of preparation. We each had valuable parts to play in the presentation and we each had interesting information to present, but we just needed to fine tune the timing and flow of it all.  We accomplished our stated goals for the lesson plan, but the TLC could have been a little more focused in the lesson throughout the change of teachers.

·         Know what “Polterabend” is and where it comes from.

·         Understand when and how a “Polterabend” is held.

·         Understand the small c cultural reasons for holding a “Polterabend”

·         Use and produce the TLC (‘Wh-‘ questions with ‘can’ and ‘do’ simple present).

·         Further reflect on the “Polterabend” practice and relate it to their experience.

Was the content and language appropriate for the student profile and proficiency level?

When I was making the character cards for the role play I wrote down things like “He has social and emotional issues” then after creating the six characters I went back and realized that that information was above our selected Ss level of High School Grade 1, Novice High/ Intermediate-Low, so I rewrote that to read “He doesn’t play well with others. He gets very excited and says silly things when there are a lot of people around.”

I also changed “She has a sharp tongue”, which is an idiom to “She likes to talk about people and make them feel bad.”  Maybe also as a teaching team, we could have focused our language to be more consistent with each other.  I think the content was appropriate for that level in the fact that there was the aspect of smashing things. Thinking about weddings is not something high school Ss are focused on; however they are aware of what goes on in them. In the Korean culture there are “wedding factories” everywhere, where a couple can walk in wearing shorts and t-shirts, get fitted out in a wedding dress and tuxedo, have a ceremony and reception, so the Polterabend would at least have some crossover cultural value.  

Was it student-centered? Did it provide ample opportunities for students to produce language (especially TLC) in meaningful and contextualized ways?

The lesson plan, in its entirety is very student centered. There is a great deal of interaction and activities involved.  The lesson that we actually taught was not as effective due to time constraints. We missed some interaction opportunities (William’s Pyramid Activity and my role play) and by skimming through the lesson we lost some of the focus on the TLC.

What aspects of the lesson plan and implementation were you pleased with? Why?

Learning about culture is fun, but actually getting to practice the culture is even better. I know it was only a short instance but getting to smash the plates and cups was fun for me and I hope it was fun for the Ss.  The part of my presentation that I thought flowed the best was using the powerpoint to elicit answers and “Wh- questions” from the Ss.  (e.g. Answer: You can bring things to smash.  Question: What ___________? What can I bring to the Polterabend?). This is something that I do a lot in my classes and it is a comfortable part of my teaching style. 

What aspects could be improved? Why and how?

Firstly, if the TLC is simple present then my role play activity may not have been the best choice. My initial thought was do the role play and have the Ss discuss what happened in the Why section with William.  We could have changed the TLC to simple past “did” and that could have worked.  The characters could then explain how they felt when the groom’s best friend said that he loved the bride. Why did you feel that way? Secondly my instructions introducing the role play were bad. I could have been more clear in the way I presented them, but I was really rushed for time and I wanted people to smash plates.  For example I could have done a teach back – I could hold up the cards and say “We are going to do a drama, I will give you a card. This is your character card. Don’t show it to anyone.  Read your card, tell your name and who you are

T: What am I going to give you?

S: a character card.

T: Who do you show it to?

Ss: nobody.  Etc etc

Thirdly, TLC focus between the team would have been a little better if we had met to smooth out the details of our finished presentation. We had a very productive meeting to discuss our plans, but we needed a little more time to meet for the finished product and fine tuning.

Shaky Scaffolding and Limiting Factors

Yesterday I needed to get a group work activity completed for my Module 3 paper, and after one day of teaching and getting some feedback from two intermediate high classes, I settled on my topic.  Limiting factors (things that restrict a population from growing e.g. lack of food or water, extreme temperatures, and predators etc).  Over the past two weeks I have been teaching about Ecosystems and the Energy Pyramid (mouse eats grains, snake eats mouse, eagle eats snake). The information in the book while very detailed, there seemed to be an understandable flow.  The task for the group work was to identify a limiting factor in a particular ecosystem (Arctic Tundra, Tropical Rainforest, Desert and Ocean) and give an example of its effect. For example - The lack of water restricts plant growth in the desert.

What I thought was a logical flow from predators eating prey limits the number of prey, to limiting factors in ecosystems, turned out to be a tough hill to climb.  I reviewed the concept of poisonous red tide algae, where the fish eat the algae and die and then there is no fish for the sharks to eat, so some sharks may die.  I had 4 Ecosystems and 4 groups, I normally give out one category to each group, but one of the students asked if we could use the Red Tide as the Ocean example.  I said yes and that threw me off and so instead of allocating one ecosystem per group, I just said do them all (3 more ecosystems and 3 more examples).  This class is very smart almost advanced level but they had a great deal of difficulty getting through this. Most groups only had 2 out of 6 answers (2 answers is their normal task).   So what I thought was the Eiffel Tower of Science Information Scaffolding, was actually a condemned shanty on the beach.

With my first dismal failure for the day I focused my efforts and tried to be more clear in my explanations to the next class of intermediate high/ advanced students, and after watching the video of that class I realized I have fallen back into a lot of teacher talk.  That said I accompany my flapping gums with a lot of gestures, but I know now that a simple written example on the board, with me eliciting why it is there from the Ss, would have been so much more successful.  Something very amusing happened in my second class. I asked for an answer from a S who spoke softly.  I couldn't hear her, so I put my hand to my ear to show her "Speak Up".  As she told me her answer bit by bit I wrote it on  the blackboard (BB). I was acting out her answer using MIC and she picked up on this, and mimed the last part of her answer to me.  I cracked up!! That was awesome!!

I realize now that even with my intermediate high/ advanced students, they have the cultural behavior of nodding their head "Yes, I understand", when they really mean "No, I don't understand".  They understood the meaning of the vocabulary word but they had difficulty applying the concepts into meaningful sentences.

   

Flowery pronunciation

I recently taught a lesson on flowers, their parts and how they are the reproductive organs of the plant. It all seemed a straightforward lesson until one of my students read a word from the flower diagram.  I showed a picture on a powerpoint slide of a flower. There were arrows pointing to different sections of the flower and the  Ss had their TB's open with a named flower diagram in it.  My S read the word as  "pee tahl". This is L1 interference as he has a mental connection (pe = blood or rain, and al would have an ahl sound like "ahl bap" a spicy meal).
I corrected his pronunciation and got the class to repeat "pet  ull", but then I looked down at the diagram to see the word "sepal" (the green leaves that protect the budding flower) on the diagram as "petal"  which for all intensive purposes has the same kind of  form  (Consonant) CeCal, then I thought about the place name "Nepal" which has a completely different pronunciation as well.  Honestly, I have rarely if ever used the word "sepal" before but I knew that it was not pronounced in the same way as petal.  I wasn't 100% sure of its pronunciation, but it turns out I was a good guesser :)

My problem now is encouraging my Ss to be excited about learning and speaking English when there are confusing pronunciations like this which would activate their affective filters, and have them clam up.   I need to focus my preparation and think like my Ss so that I don't gloss over aspects of the lesson, thinking they would already know that, or know how to pronounce it.

Teaching about perverts and swear words

Before I begin I just wanted to say that I am innocent of all charges.  My purpose was to teach some science vocabulary to my students and that was all.  I just didn't allow for this shocking but amusing culture clash. The lesson was about life cycles of animals.  I started out with the life cycle of the butterfly. The TLC was the word "Metamorphosis".  Since science words are more often than not multisyllabic, it has been my plan since the beginning of the semester to break the words down into morphemes and teach my Ss those word parts. If they notice the word parts in a new vocabulary word then they can guess the meaning of it.

Anyway, back to "Metamorphosis". I wrote the word on the BB like so  meta morph osis and got my Ss  to read the word out loud.  I asked if anyone knew what the word meant, and one of the responses I got was "byeontae" which is "pervert" in Korean.  I thought he was just being silly or rude for the heck of it, but I confirmed with my other Ss, that in Korea, the word "metamorphosis" is a word used to describe a pervert.
It wasn't exactly the point of the lesson, but it did create an interesting cultural aspect to my class.

 Another answer I got was "body changes" so I wrote that one on the BB I explained that "morph" meant "form " and I wrote that underneath morph on the BB.   I asked the Ss, "If 'morph' means form, what do you think 'meta-' means?"  They guessed it meant "Change".  I drew a semi circle over the top of the two morphemes "meta and morph".  I explained "metamorph is a verb meaning "change form".  I asked them to guess at what  "-osis" meant and they had no idea, until I gave them the hint of it changes the verb into a........."Noun!"   I also explained that "-osis" meant "the process of", so metamorphosis means "the process of changing form." (Thinking back I think that metamorphosis would apply to transsexuals).

Moving along in the lesson we learned about animals that lay eggs.  I asked, "Where do the embryos get their food from?"   The answer was they get food from the yolk of the egg.  I asked my Ss, "What is a yolk?"  It was at that point that one of my favorite students flipped me off!  I was like what the heck is wroing with my class today?????  After flipping me off, she kindly explained that "yolk" in Korean means "swear word".   So instead of asking my Ss, "What is a yolk?"  I was actually asking them "What is a swear word?"

I guess the lesson here is random episodes of weirdness will attack your classes when you least expect it, and the best plan is to go with the flow, and maybe there is some good conversational fodder for the class.

So without any further yolking around,  I bid you all adieu

short week + long lessons = frustration

This week has been a short one because of Korean Labor Day, which means I have only 2 periods to teach the lesson instead of 3. This particular lesson is four pages longer than all the previous lessons. There is a lot of vocabulary in this lesson. It starts out with the reproduction of moss, and deals with seeds, spores, flowers and finishes with pine tree reproduction.
Something happened yesterday when all the teachers and students were outside practicing activities for the Children's Day carnival, which will be on Saturday morning.  The two Korean homeroom teachers were explaining the activity to the Ss, when a gust of wind blew up and sent a mini tornado of pine tree pollen all over the poor teachers.  About 20 students looked to find me in the crowd and yelled "spores".  I had been teaching them about sexual and asexual reproduction in plants, but they haven't learned about pine trees yet (It's pollen which is sperm, therefore sexual).  Thanks God for the visual aids :)  In addition to this I have been buzzing around my classroom acting out the pollination process and using a ppt of pictures explaining this and getting one S to ask another S the question.  (TSST)
Every week I have to make a homework sheet of review for the lesson.  Marking this weeks homework sheet gave me some really great feedback of what the Ss understood and what needed reviewing. I was able to go through this information in my next class, but this means I have to make up time next week which is also a short week.  I found this week to be very frustrating given that I had to do a GW activity and had precious little time to do so. This week has not been so great for some of my students, given the volumes of vocabulary this lesson had.  Lots of TT and IRF and not great lessons = VFT (Very Frustrated Teacher)

Signs of the Apocalypse

My standard week is 2 1/2 teaching lessons, and the last half of the 3rd class of the week, I play a review ppt game with my Ss called Pirates of the Classroom.The Ss really love playing it because it is very interactive and noisy. I also really enjoy this because I can check to see how much input my Ss have retained from my lessons.
As I complete more lessons I change the questions in the game, so my Ss get to see some questions maybe 3 or 4 times sometimes.
Anyway at the end of the 5th lesson there is a chapter review, which I thought they could do together as GW. There was 15 questions and I gave them 3 minutes to finish, and the first team to have everyone in their team answer all the questions would get a 5 point bonus. Telling them this basically served the purpose of focusing their attention on answering the questions.  This worked and they were very studious, but it was interesting to see which students were operating as individuals and which were collective in their attitudes.
This was my low level class and for the entire time that I have been teaching at my school (8 weeks) there have been 2 boys in this class who would never answer a question or talk in English.  When I asked what is the answer to questions 1 and both of their hands sprung up, I almost had a heart attack.  I'm sure that it's been prophesied somewhere that when these boys answer a question in Daniel Teacher's class that this would be a Sign of the Apocalypse. They were confident in their answers because there are 2 smart girls on their team and they had discussed the answers with them before.
It really goes to show how good that "Team Talk Time" works to encourage very shy students to participate :)

Just how C is my I?

This past week marks the first time that I have actually given my students a standardized test. It is the first time that I find out “Just how Comprehensible is my Input”.  I made two tests, one for the two high level classes (A & B classes) and one for the two low level classes (C & D classes).  I made two review sheets and I had a review class and a test class this week.  The C & D classes both had an additional class this week, as a makeup class.  This was a short week because of the Wednesday holiday, so I used this makeup class as a poster making project class, focusing on the material that we had learned in class.  In this way, the students are focused on the TLC but in a more relaxed setting.  

For the C & D classes, the 2^nd page of my review sheet was the actual test.  I gave them a 3 column box of Prefixes, Root Words, and Suffixes.  There task was to choose one of each, put them all together to make a new word (it could be a nonsensical word) and then explain its meaning to me in a sentence.  I wanted to test their comprehension of the bound morphemes that I had been teaching them.  The other question on the 2^nd page was to write a sentence telling me about “planaria” or flatworms that they had studied in their Korean Science class. In class they were very verbal and had many things to tell me about planaria and I thought that this would be a great opportunity to practice their writing skills.  This was a somewhat difficult task for some of my D class students (one girl was in tears at her poor result).  I needed to challenge my C students more, for example “Write 3 sentences telling me about planaria”.  I did tell them before the test that I would be testing them on Capital Letters, Periods, Spelling and Grammar. I wrote “C P S G” on the board before the test and asked my students what that meant and they all knew.

From the tests that I have marked so far, their grammar is pretty bad across the board. Even when the students are given the correct grammar form in the question they will change it to the incorrect form in their answer.  

For example:

“Bacteria are found just about everywhere. They can live in foods, on tables and inside our bodies.”   

Question: Where does bacteria live?

Answer: The bacteria can live in foods, on tables and inside our bodies.

So just how C is my I?  One of my D students asked me during the test asked me “What is planaria?”

His test answer was “I think it is a plant.” This was great grammar, but a completely wrong answer.  This student is active in class discussions, and I had given him this exact question on his review sheet. In my defense, his entire class was disgusted at him for not knowing what planaria was.  After chunking and rephrasing and using visuals and checking comprehension, my question is just how responsible is the teacher for the student who does not study? 

My students did well for the most part, but is that a mark of how good my MIC is or is that a measure of how easy I made the tests?  This test was definitely a learning experience for me.  What did I learn:

1: Put one class name on each test, do not combine the names on the test (eg Class A & B) because the students tell each other the answers.

2. Make the C level test more difficult than the D level test.

3. Focus on correcting grammar form in class