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Cheney, Washington, United States
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Thursday, November 13, 2008

A case of efective language teaching

The most common fear that you can see in prospectives teachers is if their lessons are going to work or not, have a meaningful class with the engage students on it is one of the best feelings that a teacher may have in her/his life; just if you become a teacher because you love to teach and not if you only do it because you feel forced to do it.

On my second day of shadowing I already saw an effective way of teaching that I found really good for students; and that we studied in classes, learning through content and realia. This thursday morning we started the lesson with questions that had a lot of meaning for kids, then the teacher asked them to moved and looked outside the window, then the teacher asked them to watched very carefuly, and think; what things do they think that weren´t there 100 years ag, so only with that questions the students begun to brain storming their minds and think about it and they really were engaged on that, they said a lot of things like, the cars were older and oldfashioned; but another student said: "nooo!!, by that time the cars weren't exists"; and with that the kids started a kind of a little debate. After that the teacher asked us to get together with students, "two for each chilean teacher" he said, and the kids got together with their thinking partner, that is a very good strategy; because the teacher engaged us with the students in their work, and we started to think about how people come to the United States in the begining of times.

The class had a very good environment and the students were engage on the class because since they are from diferents countries, the topic that the teacher chose was meaningful for them, they started to think about how they came to this country and they gave their opinions about what hapened before in this country.



1 comment:

Gina Petrie/CALE/ESLG said...

Nina,
This is indeed a meaningful piece of learning that occured. I'm glad that you were able to observe it. You mentioned that you believed that the environment was better because the students were from different places. Do you think that differences are usually better for students?

Gina