Teaching Quality

Brown’s chapters 9-11 are all about course/lesson planning. I enjoyed the way Brown gave a concrete example of all the different steps of planning a curriculum. It made it easier to think about. A valid point he made was about the quality of teachers. Many times the successfulness of a course is dependent on its instructor. Since I have decided to become an educator, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of teacher I want to be. There’s an important balance between being an approachable teacher and one that facilitates knowledge acquisition. It is important that the students feel comfortable enough to ask questions, but not so much that the teacher is seen more like a friend than an educator. Students might give high rating to “nice” teachers, but even though they have friendly personalities, did they cover material? A stern teacher might get more material covered. I want to make sure I have a balance of both in my classroom.

Lesson planning is the topic of chapter 10. When teaching ELLs it is vitally important to allow time for the students to communicate and interact with each other to produce language. Therefore, teacher talk should be at a minimum and student talk should be strongly utilized. This does not mean that teachers should not talk at all. They should ask the students questions and facilitate discussion. But, students should have many opportunities during class to produce the language. Also, I feel that it is important to over-plan when it comes to lesson planning. If the lesson is to end early, the teacher should still have activities in mind that she would be able to do. Otherwise, students are missing out of prime learning time.

The dialogue in chapter 13: Monitoring Teaching Acts in Kuma’s book helped me to understand one way of evaluating how a teacher presents her lesson. In the beginning of the chapter, the sections seemed theoretical and unclear. After reading the dialogue, I had many critiques that were addressed in the evaluation of the lesson. The part that was the most upsetting to me was the numerous times she passed up learning opportunities. When a student repeatedly asks a question, usually they genuinely want to know the answer. I bet it was difficult for the observer to watch the teacher and not say anything at the time about that. If you were the teacher, would you have addressed the housing issue of homeless people living under the bridge? To me, it is acceptable to get off topic if the students are still learning and if it is somewhat related to the lesson. For example, I got through 50% of my last lesson at the ELI on schooling. However, the reason we were unable to get through the lesson was that the students had things to add about what we were talking about. I had no problem going on a tangent because they were interested in the topic and asking questions.