Have you ever
experienced ‘unplanned teaching’ in a classroom? Discuss an instance where you
grabbed a teachable moment and ran with it, ultimately providing for more
learning success for the students.
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(Additional comments on this post no longer earn points. Please choose a more recent entry).
Jarrod Duarte
ReplyDeleteI had two unplanned teaching moments this past Thursday in class. We were discussing reflexive pronouns and while doing some group reading, I noticed that 2 or 3 of my students were making the same pronunciation error in regards to some past tense verbs. They were pronouncing burned as burn-ned or cooked as cook-ed and so I grabbed this teachable moment to explain to them the right pronunciation and why it is pronounced that way (i.e. verb roots that end in /d/ or /t/ are pronounced that way but verb roots that end with any other sound are pronounced more as one sound). *I don't think I explained that very well, but I think the point comes across*. The other unplanned teachable moment came when one student incorrectly corrected another student in regards to mass nouns (ex. milk - *milks), the students began to debate this, so I took the opportunity to insert a quick little mini-lesson about mass and count nouns.
Jarrod Duarte
I can recall a couple times during group discussions at the ELI conversation clubs in which I got the opportunity to address word choice. When talking about goals, one of the students asked me if I wanted to be happy all the time. I replied that I’d rather be joyful, and received a puzzled stare from my interviewer. Explaining the difference (in my view) between joy and happiness led to a fresh conversation, and then the students did not just ask the questions on their handout. Another time when discussing idioms, I got to tell a funny personal story about the distinction between ‘passed out’ and ‘passed away.’ After I told this story, the students began telling their own stories about accidentally saying things they did not mean---creative language use!
ReplyDeleteWord choice comes up often with my conversation partners. Until now, I didn't realize those were unplanned teaching moments!
DeleteI am thinking of a time where I was asked to substitute for another teacher. When I arrived I learned that many of the students did not have the text and there were several proficiency levels. A few students mentioned that they would like to learn how to properly order meals in a nice restaurant, not a fast-food restaurant. We ran with that. I demonstrated what a waiter would normally say to them, then had each of them play the role of a waiter. We made pretend menus, including appetizers, salads, soups, entrees, deserts and drinks. We divided into table sized groups. Then the "waiters" ask for their orders and guided the others in their choices. Great fun. They learned new vocabulary, ways of asking questions and ways of expressing their choices. We had a assistant teacher there that learned a new way of teaching, and I incorporated the restaurant role-playing in my next class when it was appropriate.
ReplyDeleteI totally love it when a question or comment brings a "Let's talk about that for a while!" moment into the classroom. One occurred in the second half of a class that I was teaching. We had been talking about verb tenses in the first half of the lesson and things had been going well. As we were coming back into class, I was making small talk with a student and told her that my daughter had just gotten engaged. A few of the students overheard and started asking me questions about it. I responded and asked them how you would say fiance in Spanish. They told me (su novio which is actually the same as 'boyfriend') and then asked how you would spell ''fiance". This led to doing a whole family naming with sister-in-law through great-grandparents, and we ended up pairing up to do a 'geneological' interview with each other and reporting the results on the board as family tree for several students. Not the lesson I had planned, but a really fun and useful one as those are words used everyday (and they all have intricate, huge families!). Not only did they learn new English vocabulary, but I learned something about my students as well and now can ask them after their family members intelligently.
ReplyDeleteOne day in class, we had a fire alarm. I explained to everyone that it was probably just a drill and led everyone outside. When we returned to the class, several of my students were pretty upset. I asked who had ever participated in a fire drill. No one had. I explained that in the United States, most businesses are required to have at least one fire drill per year to test their evacuation procedures. Also, since businesses must account for all their employees, it is important to report to your supervisor once you are outside or they may send firefighters into the (burning) building look for you. Everyone settled down and we were able to continue the lesson, but I think it was good to discuss something that is pretty common in the US that is less common in other countries.
ReplyDeleteI remember last semester when I was doing a conversation partner program, my conversation partner was so upset about her writing score. So, I asked her to show me her essay to help her understand what went wrong with it. At that time I was not prepared to explain any writing tips. However, after looking at the essay, I figured that the only way to help my partner pass her second writing test is to give her the simplest but most effective essay formula. I grabbed a piece of paper and start drawing the essay map. I chose a very easy topic. Then I started brainstorming and eliciting idea from my partner. Every each step through the teaching process, I applied whatever I was teaching to her original essay. This way she could get the picture clearer. Finally, we had this well organized essay map that had simple directions and examples. It was very comprehensible especially that it combined our ideas together. My partner was so delighted that she finally got the whole idea of an organized essay. She asked me to teach her another type of essay next time I see her. This experience showed me how capable I am in one to one teaching. I really learned more than I taught in this experience.
ReplyDeleteI am inexperienced in the realm of formal teaching, but when I am working with conversations partners or Conversation Club, this is common. But, the culture of these programs lends itself to the idea of “unplanned teaching.” For example, when in Conversation Club, I usually have a list of basic questions for everyone to go over, but the point is for the students to make a conversation out of these questions, not an interview. For example, the topic was “beauty” one week. On the paper in front of the student, there was a list of “vanilla” questions such as, “What is beauty? Which kind of beauty is more important: inner beauty or outer beauty?” etc. But in my group, we moved well past that to philosophical questions of beauty on a larger scale and even dabbled in messages assigned to by society. Also, this happens with conversation partners. I like to have a markup of a topic I would like to stick to, but if my partners want to ask me about the context of the situation I’m speaking about, or if they want to ask me about something that happened during their weekend, who am I to cut them off? This is just leading towards a couple of goals of communicative learning: inspiring creative and autonomous use of language.
ReplyDeleteOne instance when I had an unplanned teaching moment was when I asked students to write down what they wanted to learn in this ESL class. This was a difficult task for them since they were used to simply following the textbook’s grammar based curriculum and had trouble thinking of specific tasks. However, I wanted them to learn to be self-directed learners who had goals for what they wanted to learn and I wanted to know these goals so that I could effectively teach a communicative approach and make the class as relevant and practical as possible. So one student wrote down they wanted to know how to write a check. In order to give some ‘instant gratification’ and since we only had a few minutes left in class, I taught them right then and there how to write a check. I also had a check in my pocket I was able to use as an example. The strength of unplanned teaching moments is that they are usually relevant and related to what students want to know ie it is a tangent ‘mini-lesson’ on an issue they’re perplexed about, already discussing, or the teacher is already discussing. The weakness is that while it is related, it’s not as much a well-thought out component of a cohesive lesson but rather a spontaneous add-on.
ReplyDeleteIn my class after Valentines Day, the director of the program came by with valentines for the students in case they had not received one in the previous class. I was in the middle of my lesson when this happened, but I asked my students if their other teacher who covers their class on the other day had talked with them about Valentines Day in America. To my surprise the other teacher hadn’t, so I had the chance to open up a discussion about this. While this did not teach language as much, it still was good because we were able to talk about how Americans celebrate Valentines Day. It was also interesting for me because it seems that it is celebrated in a similar way around the world.
ReplyDeleteI had a fabulous moment of unplanned teaching last week in class. I currently work with Level 2 adults, most of whom can understand a lot of English but are universally pretty hesitant to speak it. The program I'm working with wants us to emphasize relationship and connection as much as we can (even if it means stepping away from the planned lesson) so I always know I have flexibility if I need it. Last week toward the end of our class time, one of the students expressed frustration at the fact that our semester is drawing to a close - she is concerned she'll forget everything over the summer. All the other students began chiming in, and from there the discussion turned to their motivations for learning English, their difficulties in functioning in the US, etc. I could have turned back to teaching the lesson, but since they were using English productively (and pretty fearlessly!) I just decided to let them continue as long as they would. I would periodically insert a prompting question into the discussion to keep the flow going, but mostly I just let them discuss with each other. That little group of 6 Level 2 speakers who usually all look terrified when asked to speak one full sentence managed to hold a productive English conversation for 20 minutes! I finally did bring the discussion back around to what we'd learned in the lesson, and we closed out the period, but it was a great moment for me to be able to let them see that they actually can communicate much more fluently than they think they're able to - and they had so much fun discussing issues in English that in some ways I feel like it was just as productive as anything else we did that day!
ReplyDeleteI have experienced an 'unplanned teaching' moment in the classroom. It was during my first month of teaching a beginning level ESL class. One of my students asked me the difference between the words 'this' and 'that'. The words were not part of the lesson and I've never even considered the meaning. After thinking about the best and simplest way to explain the meaning I decided to demonstrate the words in action. I got up and put my bag on the table near me and said "this is a bag". Then I walked across the room and leaned against the wall and pointed to bag and said "that is a bag". I then went on to say that when one uses the word this it means an object is close to you and when one uses that it means the object is far away from you.
ReplyDeleteI then demonstrated the words again using objects in the classroom that were also related to the vocabulary they were learning that day. I then had the students demonstrate the words to me. They seemed to enjoy moving around. The students had an ah-ha moment and ended up using this and that in sentences using the classroom as a reference point. I was happy that my explanation wasn't too over the top and that they understood the definition of the words with the physical movement rather than with a dictionary definition.
Stefani Goode
‘Unplanned teaching’ usually takes place in two different situations. The first one is when students ask some unexpected questions, but the questions are pedagogically helpful for all other students. In this situation, although teachers do not plan to give explanation about the questions beforehand, they extemporaneously allocate sufficient time in that class to give precise answers about the students’ questions. The other one is when teachers find some mistakes of their original lesson plan, or students’ understanding is better or worse than teachers’ expectation, so the lesson plan or activities are needed to be revised. For example, I planned a word guessing game in an intermediate level class. At first, I prepared a word bank on a sheet of paper. One by one student came in front of classroom and chose a word in the word bank to explain. However, after a few turns, students already memorized the whole word bank and easily guessed what the word students explained. I should have prepared a box to contain the words separately. Then, I suddenly changed the rule covering word bank and gave a word randomly.
ReplyDelete