Lesson Observation #2

Teaching Issues – The biggest problem I noticed is that the story exists only in the teacher’s manual. It is to be read orally by the teacher. There is no big book for the students to look at and no visuals to attach to the story. The students enjoyed the story, but have a harder time connecting to it because they must listen for every detail. The biggest concern in this classroom is the fact that there is a bathroom in the room. Unfortunately, this causes problems because students constantly ask to use the bathroom. The classroom is right next to the front office. Usually, when visitors come to the school, this is the classroom they see. While this is nice, it can be distracting to the students and to the teacher as well. The students are grouped with a shoulder partner. What sometimes happens is that one or both of the students do not participate in the brief discussions. This means that students don’t practice critical reading strategies such as making predictions.

Second Language Acquisition – We acted out parts of the fable as well as giving different parts of the story a motion for the students to do with their hands. This allowed students to understand some of the more difficult parts of the story as well as helped with recall. For example, when I ask the students “What is a Fable?” the students answer by pretending to stroke the long beard of an old man and say, “An oooooold story.” An interaction that works well with these students is to share and check predictions with their shoulder partner. It allows students to verbalize a prediction about the story in a low stress environment with very low stakes. If their prediction is wrong, it isn’t that big of a deal. If their prediction is right, they tend to get excited. Picture vocabulary cards were a great example of a good material for these students. The picture vocabulary cards enabled ELLs to quickly make a connection with new words and allowed them to reference them easily as they came up in the fable.

Ethnographic Perspective – It would be very beneficial as an ESL teacher to know if my students have older parents or siblings that speak English at home. If the student has them and I know it, I know that I can give homework to these students that can be worked on with help at home. At the same time, if the student does not have any English speakers at home, I know that I am dealing with a different situation and may need to help identify resources that can assist families with learning English. The fable we are reading, “The Bundle of Sticks”, is one of Aesop’s Fables. Because there are no pictures, students are able to use their imaginations to fill in the ethnic details of the characters. The theme in the story, sharing, is universal and therefore crosses cultures. None of the characters have names and are therefore ethnically unidentifiable. To bring culture into the situation, I asked students to talk about ways they share things within their families. Some of the students responded in such a way that reflected uneven sharing within their families between siblings. Whether the unevenness was perceived incorrectly by the student or real is unknown. However, it certainly showed that even within out small group of students that we have lots of diversity when it comes to sharing.

Just some thoughts.....