School Visit Report on 4/25

 On Tuesday, I headed for Zhongshan Girl’s High School for my second school visit. Different from last visit in Fanghe,Alice arranged a high school level for observation this time. Since I didn’t have the experience of teaching high school students or even a chance to visit a highly prestigious high school like ZSGSH before, I was looking forward to today’s visit in Zhongshan.

Classroom Observation

In the beginning, in order to encourage students to respond spontaneously in class, the teacher made a deal with them. (If they behave well and volunteer to answer questions, the teacher will delay the vocabulary quiz to next class.) Being aware that we (student teachers) were going to observe her class, the teacher decided to offer them a bonus (a positive reinforcement) in expectation of creating a more interactive ambience. This was very different from Teacher Emily ( Fanghe Junior High School), who didn’t give concession to students by sparing a quiz. The variation depends on who the target learners were. In my point of view, students in junior high school were young so that Emily tried to be as good as her words. If she skipped the quiz, students might form an attitude that they would have no quiz once a while. But for students in high school, especially in Zhongshan, they were old enough to be responsible for one’s learning. Even though the teacher delayed the quiz, she considered that students had all prepared in advance. As long as teachers sensed positive reinforcement would stimulate students in some way, they certainly could add it to their teaching and thus foster students’ performance. Anyway, it could be a proper strategy to adopt occasionally in the light of various situations.

The first activity was cooking style matching. Students worked in pairs so as to find out the correct English definition of each verb, e.g. grill/roast. I saw the teacher in the effort of expanding students’ knowledge of food, the topic of lesson eight, by giving them extra materials to read. Even though their English proficiency was much better than normal high school students, they might still have problems understanding new stuff written in English at first. Therefore, the teacher asked them to complete the activity cooperatively instead of individually. I like the idea of working with their partners because students can share their understanding and opinions with each other and thus have the courage to guess the answer. I noticed that this cooperative activity worked well because students were guessing, negotiating and searching for the clues, which would impress them a lot in the end. Despite working in pairs, I would like to encourage them to answer in English. They could explain the reasons why to choose this definition by supporting clues they found in English after telling everyone the Chinese meaning. Since most students were merely restating the key words or sentences from the handout to defend their choice, they should try to say it in English so as to practice oral speaking.

What followed was an introduction of several recipes by showing slides. After the teacher assigned students homework about searching for an English recipe on the internet, she showed them some examples and explained how they could initiate homework when going back home. This would be a good and clear demonstration because students saw a concrete product in advance. The teacher then was sure that students would do the assignment in a right way. Apart from this, the teacher interacted with students while showing students those recipes. She asked what the possible ingredients are, what the dish would be like, and how they would like the dish. I recognized that this kind of talk could arouse students’ interest in longing for exploring the recipe more. When they guessed wrong, they would burst into laughter. An interactive atmosphere like this was what I would like to develop in my teaching. But, I would leave the part of reading aloud to students, which meant I would randomly choose students to read the recipe in class. If the teacher read the recipe from beginning to end, the students listened passively and might not pay attention to the content until they were being asked questions.

The last procedure was filling in the blanks with proper food or vegetable names so as to complete the idioms. This was a very good supplementary material consistent with the topic they were learning. We all knew that idioms and slang were hard to learn; nevertheless some of them were commonly used by native speakers in everyday life. Instead of giving them twenty-four idioms to fill in at one time, I would choose three to four interesting, funny and meaningful idioms for students to further delve into. For the rest of the idioms, students could finish them after class. Aside from this, I would offer short paragraphs describing the origin of the chosen idioms. Maybe I would design some activities, such as role play, matching, so as to engage students in the context and thus engrave those idioms on their memory. If I just threw them into twenty-four idioms all together without explaining or doing some activities, it would be hard to expect students to memorize or use them in real life afterwards.

My Reflection

I recognized that the teacher put a great emphasis on cooperative activities. Finding this method could prompt students to perform well, the teacher tried to provide chances for them to work together. As what I’d learned form Alice this semester, her teaching philosophy was “Return the stage back to students.” In order to achieve this goal, the first step was to engage students into the learning process. Through this process, students could develop skills like how to negotiate, how to express one’s ideas, and how to convince others. These features were beneficial for a student to possess for life.

Sitting in on an English class in ZSGHS, you would be amazed that each classroom was well equipped with rich digital resources. The teacher could choose to use Powerpoint to teach or play a movie alternatively. This phenomenon was so different from the time when I was a high school student. At that time, when I listened to Studio Classroom at school, I had to listen to a very poor radio and most of the time I couldn’t hear the content clearly. By making the best of these abundant resources, ZSGHS was able to present students’ various learning multimedia resources in the way teachers want.

After talking with teachers at the meeting later that day, I realized the importance of creating a cooperative working team. Within this team, teachers (team members) designed task-based or theme-based projects together, shared extended resources or materials with one another (like the idioms used in the class I observed), and spread their enthusiasm for teaching around. All these efforts were proved by winning an “Excellence Award.” I was touched to see the diligence of both teachers and students. Owing to a very cooperative and interactive working staff, students were nurtured, molded, and grown up. I regarded the two groups (teachers V.S. students) as mutually influential and correlated. I did believe that dedicated teachers will bring about sedulous students; even putting it the other way around would also be true.

One more thing I’d like to share was the change from controlled learning to independent learning or autonomous learning. I observed that teachers in high school centered on fostering students to be capable of learning by themselves. The ambiance in high school is much more relaxed and liberal than junior high school setting. The teacher in high school would not urge that students go home and memorize something. Since students in high school were mature enough to be responsible for their own learning, they had the right to choose what to learn and how to learn. Being a teacher, he/she acted as a facilitator or a friend who guides students to move forward, who demonstrates how to make a choice, who offers suggestions, and who furnishes students with ample resources to refer to.

All in all, no matter students are advanced learners or beginners, the core lies on how to provide students “i+ 1” input so that they will grow bit by bit. Like the case in Zhongshan, since learners have the potential to be educated further, they will be nourished by project as “More than English.” However, knowing exactly what students need requires a keen observation which takes time to cultivate. After visiting this school, I feel there are more things I need to further in the future.