Lessons worth applauding!

The secondary English teachers at Meyna School have really taken the professional development workshops I presented to heart.

Here Anil, made some of my instructional strategies his own.

Anil took the little boats I'd brought from Thailand, and rather than using the numbers I'd placed on the back, he put the student's names.

In the classroom, Anil learned to first ask the question, pause, and then pull one of the boats.  This process keeps all the students on the toes.... not knowing who might be called on to answer the question.

"You've got 30 seconds!" 

 Use of the timer, one I brought along from the States, too is a great way to keep the lesson moving and the students engaged.

The "Starter Activity" was a series of true of false statements.  Anil randomly called on students to state whether a statement was true or false.  Student stand, when answering a question.

Rather than just leaving it at asking one student, Anil would randomly call on additional students, to see if they agreed with what the first student had said.

In this case.... three students said the statement was true, before the fourth student answered correctly.... the statement was false.  "Why is it false?"  asked Anil.... again a great extension of the lesson... so that the student now had to give details to support what they'd said.

As soon as Anil passed out this reading assignment, the students, on their own, numbered the paragraphs, and drew a box around the title.  Another instructional strategy straight from my workshop!

New vocabulary.... randomly calling on students to identify key new vocabulary words, paragraph by paragraph.

Writing the definitions of the new words on the board, for the students to copy.

I'm seeing this throughout the English classes, where the teachers have taken what I taught them during the professional development sessons, and have begun incorporating these new strategies into their daily lesson plans.

Unannounced observation - Anil's 11B classrrom

With the professional development workshops over, I stopped in, unannounced in Anil's classroom.  I was interested in seeing, which instructional strategies he'd incorporated into his lesson.

All of the students were on task, actively engaged in the lesson.  This is always a good sign, especially at the beginning of the period.

The students were busy completing the "Starter Activity" (bellwork) as I entered.

Building on the workshops, Anil had incorporated a "Starter Activity" which was a review of the vocabulary words from a reading comprehension assignment he'd done with students the previous day.  This review too, was straight out of the professional development workshops.

In the upper right hand corner of the whiteboard.... the Learning Objective for the lesson was written.  During the lesson, Anil drew the student's attention to this Learning Objective...... specifically noting that the first part involved reading comprehension and the second part, answering the questions related to the text.

In today's lesson, Anil wanted to assess his student's reading comprehension abilities, and as such did not provide the direct instruction he might use, based on this diagnostic assessment.

Anil read the passage on lions in Kenya to the whole class, then gave them time to answer the questions on the back of the handout.  The questions follow Blooms Taxonomy of higher order reasoning.  Anil wanted to see how far, beyond basic knowledge and recall the students could go on their own.  Specifically he wanted to assess their analytical abilities through the answers to the questions.

Following the lesson, Anil and I had a chance to reflect on his student's reading comprehension skills.  When he first gave the handout to his students, they followed their typical pattern of immediately turning it over to start answering the questions.... before even reading the text.

We discussed the point that he may want to spend a few weeks, retraining his students in how to start a reading comprehension activity.  That reading comprehension comes before answering the questions.... and that the structured activities we discussed in the workshops might be a way to achieve this.