Observation Report on Classroom Management

Week 5-6                                                        

Class: 8/C, 8/D                                                                    Muhammed Emin Yüksel    
Date: 13.11.2015/ 20.11.15                                                                       Caner Koca
School: Celalettin Sayhan Primary School

5th Week

In the first task, we were supposed to observe the instructions the mentor gave during the lesson. The first thing we would report about ‘signaling start of activity’ is that we could not realize the start of the activity as it was not clear enough. She started asking the first question of the activity in a straight manner. What we clearly observed was that the teacher used a simple language with short and clear sentences. Voice quality was also enough to have control over the classroom. However, most of the lesson was held in Turkish instead of the target language. As for using mime, gesture, body language and eye contact, we would say that these aspects were not clearly observed because she was sitting on her desk during the lesson. Ending of activity was also the other aspect that was not clearly observed.

One thing we appreciated during the lesson was that she used a pencil, a pen and a board marker as visual aids to differentiate the meanings of the objects. Except for that, however, the lesson was a bit monotonous and lacked mimes gestures and demonstration. Mimes, gestures and body language should be considered important to avoid a boring classroom environment. Clearer instructions that could possibly attract the students could have been used instead of a direct start. Otherwise, this causes an impossibility to draw the attention of the students. 

We are expected to make an enough observation and fill in the observation chart for each task, but we are not provided with an appropriate classroom environment to carry out the tasks properly. The teacher and us are limited to a few activities that are suitable to our tasks because of their discrete schedule for the students to be prepared for the TEOG exam.

6th Week

 

Pair and group work activities are known to be a beneficial learning strategy to help students interact and learn from each other. In this case, this kind of activities should often be included in classroom environment. During the 6th week of our internship experience, we were required to observe an activity involving pair or group work. This report will focus on the role of the teacher during the activity held in the 8th grade classroom.

We should remind the fact that the students we observed take English classes in a way profoundly focused on grammar rules. They are expected to attain a high level of grammar proficiency so as to pass the TEOG exam, as mentioned in the previous reports. For this reason, the teacher did not want to arrange a group work at first, because she had other grammar activities for the students. However, because of our kind request for a little group work activity, she thankfully held a short activity of what we suggested.

The activity started with the teacher organizing groups of four students. There were 3 different groups including 4 voluntary students in each group. She used Turkish to give the instructions to make everything clear. She asked students to form a line oppose to the blackboard with a certain distance, and told them that she would read sentences, which could be grammarly true or false. The students had to run to the board right after the teacher reads the sentence and write ‘T’or ‘F’. The teacher made clear that they should write ‘T’, if the sentence is correct, and F, if the sentence is false. She stood at the corner of the classroom and started to read aloud sentences in an understandable way. Later on, one student from each group run to the board and wrote ‘T’ or ‘F’, and was rewarded with 2 points if the answer was correct. At the end, the winner group was selected depending on the last results. As we mentioned, this activity was not in the schedule, rather included upon our request.