Garri, One of your strengths is that you do not hesitate to be self-critical. This is truly the best way for you to learn as teacher.
Your ppt. slides were nicely prepared. I could see that you put a lot of time into creating them. Good work!
Your explanations were clear. Your examples were well chosen. Only one example was a bit more complicated than it needed to be (it may have had an objective complement).
However, you offered too much new information in too short a time span without a break for students to practice doing some work on their own and in groups. You had told me that you would stop after about 40 minutes and let students do some sort of exercise on verbals. That was a very good plan and you should have stuck with it. This is one of the hardest lessons for new teachers to learn: to create a plan (timed out with activities) and then stick with that actual plan. It's an importnat teaching skill to learn.
Also, your students need a "time out" from being presented new information. Especially new grammar items.
What you need to do is to pay more attention to students as learners and less attention to the concepts that you are explaining. You need to look closely at students' faces and think about what they are experiencing. Do any students show signs of fatigue? Boredom? Tuning out? That is a sure sign that you need to stop and let students do some individual or group activity. Remember that teaching is a rhetorical activity in which audience is a crucially important element.
In the last 20 minutes, several students looked tired and looked as if they had had enough of grammar.
You are right that some students to not speak voluntarily in class. This is why i handed you the roster of names for you to use to call on students by name. If you are still learning their names, you can use that roster to match a name to a face. If you call on a student just one time -- that student will be more likely to volunteer to speak in the near future. By calling on a student, if you do it in a friendly and inviting tone, you are extending an invitation that is often needed and wanted by students who are shy or hesitant about their knowledge. Women can be especially hesitant about speaking in public. Even today, many women have been groomed from childhood to be "good girls" who listen and are polite and speak only when spoken to.
You can call on students in a non-threatening manner and let them off the hook if they don't know an answer. More importantly, you can ask questions that any student can respond to in order to draw all students into the circle of conversation. You should always call on students by name if at all possible. In so doing, you let students know that you see them as individuals and you care enough to learn their names and speak to them by name.
Also, it's a good idea to ask students to produce new sentences of their own in order to let them practice using verbals and other new grammar items. Production is a very good way for students to be active language learners.
To get students more actively involved, you can ask students to write on the board often and regularly in order to "share" that front of the room desk and blackboard space with students. That is a power space that is often "owned" by the teacher, who is the fountain of knowledge for students who are receiving knowledge. You can turn that idea upside down by moving your own self to the back of the room and moving students to the front of the room where they present a sentence and explain an analysis or something else. Let students into that power space.
Garri, there were several very successful aspects of your lesson: your ppt. slides were clear and well constructed, your explanations were clear, and for the most part your examples were clear. There was one sentence that was too complex for this lesson and should have been left out. That was the sentence that you asked me about ("have we covered objective complements?"). I would have erased that sentence from the slide altogether.
The bottom line is this: what students are doing as learners in a class is crucially important. Keep your eyes on students always. Pay attention to what they say and don't say, what they are doing, and to their body language. And if you see that students need to take a break, stop the class and give them a break of some kind. Adults really need to switch activities about every 20 minutes.
I am very positively impressed by your own self-criticism and I think you are right on target.
I do want to see you paying more attention to student learning experiences (and acting on what you observe) and less attention to your own explanations and presentation.
Your lessons are improving as you go along, and you are learning about teaching and learning. That is the most important part of this experience, not your actual performances in the class. Good work overall.
Barbara
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