Teacher Craig

Today my boss Tammy had me come in to observe one of the teachers in 3 of his classes. Each class was about 90 mins. Teacher Craig, as he is called, was super helpful, very nice, and very honest about his teaching style and theories. I think watching his classes really helped me get an idea of the flow of the class.

The Wells school has a strict lesson plan for each session. Craig was able to fit 5 - 7 activities into each class. That will help me with the pacing a lot, and I think thats one hard part of lesson planning. You have a certain amount of material, a certain amount of time, and you need to figure out how much time to spend on different segments.

It was also obvious between the different classes that the students make a huge difference in the way the class goes. Some classes are slow and take a lot of patience, others are quick and you can really see them learning and retaining knowledge. Some classes may even be too energetic and you would find yourself trying to keep everyone focused. It seems the pacing between exciting and more calm activities is really important. If the students can feel interested and happy then they will look forward to coming each session.

The teacher's aide can also be very important for keeping discipline and dealing with grading. It's also important to keep the language between teacher and student strictly in English. If the students realize they can talk to you in Chinese they will become lazy and less creative in trying to use their limited English to convey their thoughts.

So I think I learned a lot today. Tomorrow I need to watch another Teacher, Jen. I hope I can learn something different from seeing her style.