Teaching Practice: Give Students Power

Teaching Practice: Give Students Power
April 11, 2011 by Cintia Stella
Today was the penultimate teaching practice in the teacher training course. Same as last month, it was a reinforcement class for Basic level students who had just learned the Present Continuous tense, and despite the fact that I could have used the same activities that I had used in March, I wanted to plan new ones. I knew that my fellow trainees, who had done the teaching practice the day before, had given the learners a good amount of written activities such as Listen & fill in the gaps, Read the questions & answer and Write a Postcard so I decided to plan different ones.
This is one of the activities that we did and that worked very well:
- Picture dictation: I told the students that I would read a description so they had to listen carefully and draw what they heard. I anticipated that some of them might not feel comfortable due to their lack of artistic skills, so I explained that the quality of the drawing didn’t matter, as long as we could all understand what they had meant to draw. I gave them an example, by making some drawings on the board, and that was clear enough. You can look at the photo below and you’ll notice that I’m not very artistic (or should I say that I am not artistic at all?):
The description I read was about people on the beach, and I included some more challenging sentences such as: An old man is NOT reading the newspaper, he is smoking a pipe. Two tall women are walking but ONLY ONE of them is wearing a skirt.
I allowed plenty of time between sentences for them to draw and I noticed they were really enjoying the activity. When I finished the dictation, I asked the students to get in pairs and show their drawings to their partners. Finally, I asked if anyone wanted to copy the drawing on the board, and I quickly had 3 volunteers. Here they are:
I didn’t expect to do anything else with this activity after the students had copied their drawings on the board, but two of them had drawn some objects which they didn’t know how to say in English: to represent an old man, one of the students had drawn a person sitting in a wheelchair while another student had drawn a man with a walking cane. I gave them the English word for both objects and elicited some sentences to make sure that they had understood.
Some of the students asked me if they could do a similar activity because they had liked it a lot, so I asked the whole class if they agreed and they all did. I didn’t have another description to dictate, so I suggested that they did the whole activity by themselves. I told them to get into 2 groups, and that they would have to write the description that the other group had to draw.
I wasn’t sure if students at this level would be able to work independently, but they did such a wonderful job! I was there in case they needed me, but I didn’t interfere.
I enjoyed the idea of giving students power. During the teacher training course I’d read about this but honestly, I didn’t know how to put it into practice. Finally, without even planning it, I did, and I feel that I’ve made a good step forward as a teacher.
Posted in activity, learning, teacher training, teaching | Tagged activity, give students power, picture dictation, teaching practice