Taylor CO #1

Taylor
Class Observation #1
Reading
Level 1

On Wednesday I observed Ryan Flemming's level 1 reading class. It was an interesting first class observation to say the least.

The class consisted of 8 students. Ryan started off by introducing me, he told them that I was there to learn and I wouldn't be grading their English. He said this to lower their Affective Filters. First he handed back a quiz from the day before and had them talk in groups about what they missed. The idea was to have students teach each other how to answer the questions they had missed.

For the past few classes they had been reading the book "White Fang" so before they picked up where they left off the teacher asked the students to take turns summarizing what had already happened in the story. Ryan read the story aloud, stopping to ask questions to make sure that the students understood the story and were paying attention. When the students would use incorrect grammar, word choice, or pronunciation the teacher would say "sorry, what" to give them a chance to correct their mistakes.

Next there was a vocabulary assignment. Students were divided into groups and asked to write sentences using a list of 15 vocabulary words from the story, but first they had to determine if the words were nouns, verbs or adjectives.

Two of the students was very unhappy with their group and started to fight each other, at first I thought they were just playing, but when the teacher had to jump in to pull them apart I realized they weren't joking. It escalated and it took another teacher coming in and pulling the two boys out to stop the fighting.

Later Ryan explained that there had never been a fight in his experience as a teacher, but that it was important to remember cultural differences in these situations and take the opportunity to teach students from other places what is and isn't acceptable in an American classroom.