McKenzie- Observation- 2

Today I observed Felicia's Reading class. She started off by writing on the board:

Today's Agenda:
1. Attendance
2. Bias, Tone, Purpose, Audience
3. Great American Stories

She told them they had 3 minutes to review in groups what they discussed yesterday. She then gave them ten minutes to read two articles. After the ten minutes was up, they had a class discussion about the articles. Everyone volunteered and contributed to discussion and asked questions.
Felicia spoke very slowly, and probed the students to pick out details from the story. She was really good at guiding their discussion and it was clear all of the students were comfortable. One phrase in the article was "footdragging" and to explain, Felicia trudged around the classroom very slowly, dragging her feet, which made it easy for the students to guess that it just meant to go slow.
Felicia also allowed the students to self correct. When she said that she would be gone on Friday and they would have a substitute, one student asked, "Where are you?" and she said "I am right here." He said, 'No, on Friday. Oh wait. Where WILL you be on Friday?" He was able to fix his own mistake.
Overall, Felicia is clearly a great English teacher. Her students really like her, she is organized, good at time management, and made the class interesting.