Social Service_BA in Teaching English: Activity 5

Partner Professional Dialogue

By Sergio Méndez

The Five Standards for Effective Teaching is a term which I had never heard before or at least in such fancy words. As I was working in the activity for this unit I realized that the Five Standards for Effective Teaching has to do to what I usually do in class, which is integrating students and teachers by generating opportunities for dialogue. Despite of the fact that my activity is a listening exercise, it provided integration between the students and me. Discussing this exercise with a colleague provided me with feedback which is useful in case I use this activity again.

My activity aimed at developing my students listening comprehension skills. It might look like there is no too much dialogue in this sort of exercise, but this dialogue took place in the pre and post stages of the activity. Still, there was more dialogue between the teacher and students than among students. This means that the joint production was generated while I and the students were producing together in a whole class activity. My major participation was designing, enacting, pressing, assisting in the activity, and providing feedback for the activity.

This listening exercise (Predicting Bingo) required the students to predict, based on the title (The Earth Without Humans), what the future would be like without the intervention of humans. Based on this, they had to draw a tic tac toe grid in their notebooks in which they had to write a topic-related word in each of the spaces in the grid that they thought it would be mentioned in the recording. While listening, they had to cross out the words the recording mentioned and that they had in their grid. The students who crossed three words in line, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, were the winners. This listening exercise was contextualized in the students’ previous knowledge by integrating their previous knowledge from home, school or community with the current activity.

There are some modifications that can be carried out in order to include additional opportunities for students-students dialogue in this listening exercise. For instance, students can discuss in pairs or trios how the future without humans would be like before listening to the track and write their predicted vocabulary in their grids. Another additional opportunity would be after the listening exercise. Students could use the vocabulary in their grids to talk about the lesson topic with a different classmate. All in all, this listening exercise was useful for students to practice their listening skills. This listening activity was appropriate to the students’ level of English, and also provided them with the opportunity to work on their listening skills more intensely since they had to identify specific vocabulary (their predicted vocabulary) in the track.

The comments provided by my colleague generated ideas which suggested changes in order to improve my class. These suggestions were directed to the post stage of the class. After having students checked the words they cross out in their tic tac toe grid, they could have used them either to have a speaking activity (talk about the future without humans), or a writing exercise (write some sentences or a short paragraph with the words in the tic tac toe grid).

To come to the point, I believe that this activity promoted a good joint product. The students and I worked together to achieve an objective: develop the students’ listening skills. Besides the class, what I liked of this peer observation is that teachers can be greatly benefited from receiving comments and suggestions for remedial work for future classes.

Classroom Observation