Class Observation 3

Teacher: Diego
Program: English
Time observed 2 hours
Date 2015-07-14

This session was on the third floor in a closed classroom with a group of 15 students (Ss) from different areas taking a 40 hour course of English. According to the conversation with the teacher (T) the objective is to cover some of the basic grammar topics, because they are supposed to have been taken the virtual courses in advance.

The class

It was a theoretical class, The T goes over grammar topics like simple preset, simple past, adverbs of frequency, countable and non-countable nouns among others, T makes an explanation on the board mixing Spanish and English, but mostly in Spanish, after every explanation he asks questions like “¿Como se dice?” (How do you say…?), trying to find out how much the Ss know the vocabulary, but most of the times the answer was given by the same 2 Ss. Meanwhile most of the Ss take note.

DO’s

For me it was very difficult to extract the best because it seemed like the antithesis of what I consider an English class should be.

DON’Ts

It was a totally teacher’s centered class, I did not really found the order of the topics, the T did not give time for Ss to analyze or even ask, and the questions were always answered by the same students so there were many Ss that did not say a word during the whole; T jumped dramatically from one topic to another and there was no a communicative objective for the session.

 

After the session I interviewed the T and he told me that he felt pressured for that class because he was not an English teacher, that he was a technical drawing teacher, and he had to take that class just because he knows how to speak the language, and also because he has to complete the teaching hours in his schedule. That he does not know if he reached the objective of the class, but he tries to do what he can.

That makes me think that the administrative decisions taken by the coordinators are sometimes contradictory and not coherent with the institutional perspective, and of course they affect the Ss learning process.