Observed Lesson (Spain)

    

For my pre-practicum experience, I was assigned to help Alicia with her English conversation lessons in Bachillerato (equivalent to the last two years of high school). On the first day, I just consentrated on getting to know the students and getting comfortable with the class. The next two lessons, Alicia assigned me to give a lesson on my home, New York City. While giving my lesson, Alicia and I noticed, by the students’ responses, that they needed reinforcement in expressing the past tense. Therefore, Alicia decided to make a lesson on using the past tense for the following day. Her lesson consisted of having the students work in pairs. She had questions written out that the students had to ask each other and the answers had to be in the past tense. She and I would walk around listening to make sure that the students spoke correctly. However, Alicia was not able to complete the lesson because the classrooms computer did not work. To not waste paper, Alicia had put the questions in a pen-drive to project the questions on a screen. The problem was that someone had stolen the computers battery cable and the computer had run out of power. After fifteen minutes trying to find another cable or computer, she decided to desist and taught another lesson. She had a drawer in her office full of backup lessons just in case an emergency like this one occurred and she could not teach the planned lesson. I found this to be a genius idea; every teacher should have prepared backup lessons in case of an emergency. Anyway, her lesson then became "speaking in the conditional," which consisted the same structure as the previous lesson. She passed out sheets with questions that the students had to ask each other, except that the answers to the questions had to be in the conditional. At the end of class, Alicia assured the students that the next lesson was definitely going to be about speaking in the part tense, whether the computer worked or not.

While her lesson showed me that a teacher should always have a backup, it also made me realize that we are too dependent on technology. Fifteen minutes of class time had been lost on trying to find a power cable for the computer. There was a chalkboard in the classroom. Even when the questions were in the pen-drive we could have easily invented some other ones and written them out on the board. However, this idea did not occur to anyone until some hours after the class had finished. We all were so stuck on the fact that the lesson was made to be displayed that we did not think of other alternatives.  This is when I understood that, when planning a lesson (especially one that is dependent on technology) one should also pre-plan for problems. Because even if the solution is simple, in the spur of the moment, one might not come across the answer and may lose a whole lesson. This is when most of the BC lesson plan formats and lesson start making so much sense.
 

Lesson Observation (Bath, England)

One week in pre-school in Bath, I paid special attention to my CT, Mrs. Williams, lesson planning and how she conducts lessons overall.  When I first arrived to help in the classroom, I had almost no expectation of true formal lessons being taught.  I thought that such a young group of thirty children would not be able to grasp what I think of as traditional lessons.  However, this is constantly proven to not be true with this age group.  In America, students do not perform on this level until about age five, but these four year olds are learning to read, write, and do math among other things throughout each school day.  I also feel that they come across as so competent as first time students because of Mrs. Williams’ teaching methods.

In particular, her organization and conscientiously planned lessons continuously engage the students and make a better learning environment for them in general.  The best lessons I have seen her teach are in mathematics.  She varies her methods of instruction nearly every time I have observed her, which the children find more exciting.  She does this while making her lessons full of meaningful content, but manages to help the students have fun as well.  This is a very impressive and admirable way of teaching that I hope to gain myself as a future teacher.

In one math lesson, the students were told to sit in a circle, instead of their normal carpet rows, and Mrs. Williams placed a series of small white boards on the floor.  The first one had the head of a snake drawn on it and the last one had a tail.  In between, she wrote a few numbers in the sequence of 1-10, leaving five spaces blank.  She then called on a student who could help her to fill in the missing numbers to complete their sequence.   The children noticeably found this enjoyable and eagerly responded to her need for participation.  The class then worked together completing the sequence and counted all together out loud once they did it correctly.  Mrs. Williams’ ability to make the whole class included and engaged in this lesson, as well as numerous others I have seen, makes delivering lessons so much more enjoyable both for the teacher and the students.  She teaches with clear opening tasks and closing points that also make the lesson feel very relevant to the children, which is part of what makes her lessons so effective.

Promoting Equity and Social Justice (Bath, England)

At Widcombe Infant School in Bath, England, equal opportunities are given to each student regardless of the circumstances that they find themselves in which are out of their control.  It is clear that the teachers take the time to know about each individual’s background and family life as well as any other contexts that play a part in a child’s education.  In general, the school, while maintaining a great reputation, takes students from the surrounding area and accommodates their needs as they come about.  In this way, they are not discriminating against any issues that arose early on in the child’s life, allowing everyone to be on equal ground in the school context of their lives.

One example of accommodating to ensure equal opportunities for all students revolves around one student’s family life.  His father came forward and said that he would encourage his son’s school work as best as he could, but that he could not read and write himself, so he would not be able to help complete homework with the student or read the required books with him at home.  In knowing this, the teachers then ensure that the student gets extra help during school time so that he has someone to read to him or read to because this is a crucial exercise in the reception (pre-school) class.  When they have to communicate with the student’s father at home, they talk on the telephone and keep him up to date verbally as opposed to doing so through notes or e-mails.  This is one way in a series of many that I have noticed at the school in which students are guaranteed an equal opportunity for the best education possible.

Spain/United States similarities and differences

Teaching in Spain is wonderful and I have been having an amazing time doing it. However, while I have seen many small differences between the education in Spain and ours, there are two things that have stood out. The primary difference that I have observed has had to do with student-teacher relations. In the United States, we are taught to call our teachers “Mr.” or “Mrs. /Miss” and only by their last names. This demonstrates respect and makes it clear from the beginning that teacher and student relationships have limits. Furthermore, most American students have also been taught, since childhood, that teachers are a major fountain of discipline away from home. This does not seem to be the case for students that go to public or charter schools in Spain (I do not include private schools because, from what I have seen, the teachers there are shown a great amount of respect from both students and parents). In these schools, the students call the teachers by their first name and treat them like friends. They make jokes at the teachers´ expense and make demands like they run the class and this is normal for the teachers. Furthermore, the parents’ don´t seem to have respect for the teachers either. In the school I was pre-pracing in, teachers had parent-teacher conferences almost every day and almost all the teachers dreaded these meetings. This was because most of the parents would come in to demand that the teacher give their son/daughter a better grade on a test, or for the semester, no matter if the child deserved the grade they got. One of the most unbelievable stories that I heard was that, there were a couple of parents that had brought in lawyers to analyze the exams that the students had failed, so they could assert that the grading was unfair. However, since the students had left more than half the exam unanswered, they could not do anything. After that, the teachers have to keep all the exams and work that the students do during the year as evidence in case parents try this stunt again.

Another difference that surprised me a lot was the amount of information students are required to learn from early on. Students are required to learn a second language from the moment they start school. Moreover, in history class the study of geography is obligatory and students are required to learn the names of all the countries, rivers, and mountains of the world. In my history class, I was taught extremely basic geography and was required only to learn the names of three or four river and mountains. Furthermore, my ten and eleven year old students were required to learn biology in English. But not just simple biology with basic vocabulary, no. They were required to learn all of the bodies systems (digestive, excretory, reproductive, nervous, etc.) with each organ and their function in a language that was foreign to them. This is extremely difficult for them because it is a completely new subject taught in a language that they are just learning. In the United States, I did not start learning biology in such depth until I was thirteen years old. It is amazing to me the demands they give these students and the fact that they are completely able to comply with these demands. This gives me the feeling that, in the United States, they underestimate what and how much information can be taught to the younger students and this is something that needs to be evaluated and fixed.

  However, there were also some similarities in teaching instruction that I thought were interesting. For examples, the classroom layout for both countries is the same. Students sit in groups of four or five until they are thirteen or fourteen years old, which is when they start sitting more in rows. This observation interested me and I started wondering the reason for this. Does this change in classroom structure at that age increase classroom learning? Another similarity that I thought was interesting was that standards were also measured in the same way. Most teachers taught by the book and gave a lot of importance to exams. I consider this format of teaching to be erroneous and it needs to be changed here as well as in Spain.