On July 20th I taught the third teaching hour of my practicum in my conversation cafe. I am trying to find more opportunities for the students to talk within the class. This led me to adopt the theme of discussion going forward in the class. In this lesson we talked about persuasion, trying to convince others to agree with your point of view. The goal was to create a list of the pros and cons of a topic.
I started the lesson with a relationship-building piece by having the students write out a “star” and a “wish” about their weekend. The stars were something they liked about their weekend, while the wish was something they wish would have happened. It was great to see the students type out their answers on the shared notes, but to encourage more talking from students I asked follow up questions to their answers. This was a good opportunity to connect further, but also to make corrections on their written sentence.
The activity I had originally planned to do with the class was too advanced for their skill. This gave me an opportunity to decide how to better structure future classes. I am going to break up elements of creating a discussion and challenge the students to have more opportunities to share verbally. I tried the breakout rooms again today and I found that groups with 5 students were more effective than groups of two or three. The students were able to produce ideas about our topic and contributed to our whole class discussion.
Next class, I am going to challenge students to expand their vocabulary while sharing their ideas using phrases that agree with ideas that are being shared. A challenge that I foresee coming up will be my next class because I will be recording it. So, unfortunately, that will mean that I will not be able to have the students come on to the camera. I am still pushing myself to think less like a Canadian teacher and more like a language teacher.