Class Monitoring (2)

This week I monitored Debbie's listening class. I found Debbie to be a very interesting teacher. She lived in Brazil for twenty years and taught English. I did not have the opportunity to speak to her as much as I would have liked.

Her classroom is fast paced and she does an excellent job of keeping control of the class. The students were not allowed to use their cell phones, she kept off topic conversation to a minimum, and she prohibits the constant use of electronic dictionaries. She felt it was more important to pay attention to the lesson, as a whole, instead of getting preoccupied by the meaning of a single word.

The lesson today was a continuation of a lesson from the previous week. The students have been working on units of measurement. Last Friday, Debbie brought the materials and the students were given a recipe to read which allowed them to make individual apple pies.

The listening exercise today was listening to a recipe and writing down the directions. She gave the students the recipe to make a Betty Crocker chocolate cake. During the reading of the recipe, she did not stop to tell the students how to spell certain words. One of the words they had trouble with was "rectangular". No one knew how to spell it and this caused some concern among the students. However, she did not allow them to look it up. She told them to sound it out and she would tell them how to spell it when she was finished reading the recipe.

When she completed reading the recipe, the students were given a list of questions to answer regarding the information she has just read.

I thought this was a great lesson. The students were interested. The topic was fun. Really, who does not like talking about chocolate cake?

As a side note........I learned that Betty Crocker was not an actual person. She was a fictitious character made to sell a brand of cooking products, books and pre-made recipes.