In this online observation, there is one instructor teaching to a small class of adult English language learners. The class looks like it is apart of a formal educational setting opposed to the community program setting of Tanya Cowie’s class. The instructor takes anecdotal notes of the student’s conversations during activities. The instructor allows the students to share their thoughts and observations with the class. The instructor then provides the class to make deeper connections by giving them guiding questions to answer. The instructor delivers her lesson by using a PowerPoint, photos, videos of dialogs samples.
In the first part of the lesson, the instructor focuses on understanding and interpreting dialogue. The dialogue she is teaching involves a moral dilemma for the students to interpret. In the dialog two colleagues discuss what to do with a wallet of money that one of them has found. To set the students up for understanding all the pieces of the dialogue the instructor front-loads the information necessary, such as teaching about charities like the red cross. Once the students have dissected the dialogue as a class the teacher moves to the second part of the lesson which focuses on tenses.
The instructor used many methods to deliver the lesson. I noticed that in this setting however it was a less engaging lesson than the previous ones I had watched. The U shape of the desks allows for the instructor to get in close proximity with her students all at once, but it limits ease of working in groups larger than two. When the class worked in groups larger than two it required the students to have to stand as they worked together. The U did allow the instructor to ask each student directly to participate and easy for her to correct their pronunciation when they were repeating or answering. The instructor demonstrated a different way of keeping track of students progress by using anecdotal notes. This gives the instructor a goal to accomplish while students are independently working.