Development - Developing with your students – circle two | Delta Publishing

Developing with your students – circle two

Monday 8 June 2009

The second circle for teachers to develop in is with their students. This is arguably the most important circle of all. Our students know our teaching better than anyone and are probably the best people to help us improve it. Classroom teaching is basically a social event. A group of people come together with the aim of learning something, with a leader(the teacher) designated to facilitate this. The social event can take a range of forms. Here are possible metaphors for some of them. I’m sure you can think of more. A party, a barbecue, a book club, a band reherasal, a dinner party, a country walk…A very dominant underlying metaphor for many classrooms is the performance. The teacher puts on show for students, the audience.

Whether your classroom is a walk in the country or an evening at the Moulin Rouge, there are plenty of ways to develop your teaching in collaboration with your students: here are some possibilities:


Make some new material
Use authentic materials (DVD, Internet, newspapers etc)
Get feedback from my students
Talk to my students socially
Do some action research
Get feedback from my students
Get to know more about an individual learner
Hold tutorials with my students
Learn my students’ mother tongue
Do a needs analysis with my students
Get my students to teach me something
Learn about my students’ culture
Record students on tape or video

Below is an example of an activity you can do to get feedback from your students. I think student feedback is an area which is often overlooked in teacher development. This activity is quick and easy to do and is guaranteed to give you and your students plenty to think about.

Cool feedback

What can you remember?

Rationale

This activity helps you understand what is memorable for students, not necessarily in terms of what they learnt but how they think about the lesson as an event and in hindsight.

Step One

At the start of the lesson write on the board the following question:

What can you remember about the last class we had?

Step Two

Give out slips of paper and ask the students to write a few lines in response to the question. Tell them they can write any memories that come into their head about what they did, saw, said, learnt, about the room the people the teacher, what they heard, a funny thing that happened anything. You might want to give a prompt or two to help them focus. Give them a few minutes to do this. Do it yourself too

Step Three

Tell students to pin their pieces of paper on the wall for others to read or pass them round. Join the students in reading and commenting on what they have written as appropriate. Keep this light hearted.

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