Group Work
I read my Teacher Evaluations earlier this week, yes, kind of late, but I did finally remember at a moment when I was able. It was good to read them, for once. Well, not exactly for once. I did occasionally have mostly positive reviews when I was teaching college English, but complaints were a bit more commonplace, which I usually racked up to the fact that a lot of students didn't want to be there. My reviews as a continuing ed French teacher were always mostly positive. They weren't 100% positive, but encouraging enough to give me confidence to pursue this degree I'm in the midst of now. Sometimes the "negative" ones were useful, though. I have changed how I teach, certain things I do, based on what students say. And my reviews from last semester weren't 100% positive either. I'm not sure what to do about the negative ones, though. It was mostly one student who seemed to be on the "strongly disagree" category, and he or she was upset because I spoke French most of the time, but that's actually part of the teaching philosophy here at University of Arizona, so that won't change much. If anything, I hope my French improves so I won't be stumbling over my feminines and masculines and words I don't know.
Now, in spite of all of that, I didn't want to write just to tell about my student reviews. It's actually been a painful subject many times. But no, I bring it up now because of one of the positive things a student said, as well as a suggestion for improvement. The student wanted more group work. I found this interesting because we didn't have a whole lot of "group" group work last semester. We had a lot of pairing off by twos or threes if there weren't even numbers, but the few "group" group things we did were not as successful as I would have liked for a few reasons--mostly because there wasn't actually enough material for much interaction for those particular activities.
But I do like the idea of group work. I believe a lot of success can come from it, especially in language learning where students should be learning to communicate with real people rather than computer-based recordings. But language learning or other learning, I'm thinking that group work has one of the other benefits that I've looked to before--it stimulates positive emotions, and positive emotions lead to stronger memories.
Even though it's normal for people not to smile all the time, even if they're not necessarily unhappy, such as, particularly, when they're concentrating on something, I still really like seeing people smile, and maybe especially my students, but definitely people in general, too.
So let me tell you about a few group activities we did this week and how this all ties in. On Monday, we had what's called an "Info Gap" activity for which the instructions and set up were not great. There were a few ways it could have been done, but I interpreted it as an activity where the students were supposed to be partnered off, and each part of the pair had eight pictures that were different from the other partner's. They then, without looking at their partners' pictures, had to put the eight picture pairs together. The basic idea is fun. We did something similar in my Methods class last semester, which might have directed my perspective about how to accomplish it.
In any case, with 16ish in one class and 22ish in the other, it would have taken too long to pass out all of the tiny papers to everyone, so for the first class, I ended up putting them in groups instead of in pairs. And in spite of my misgivings about it, everyone seemed to like it. After it was over, I asked for a general satisfaction with the activity, thumbs up or thumbs down, and I got a lot of smiles and people saying it was fun. Whadda ya know? I think part of it was the opportunity to work with different people as well as some of the chances to use the language in different circumstances that led to this feedback. Based on my own thinking about the activity on Saturday night as I studied the picture groups, that's the only conclusion I can come up because with their level of French, it would have been a little tricky to do the activity as designed. It wasn't one of the typical learning exercises for this early in the year--that is, the picture pairs' similarities didn't fit neatly into the same basic grammatical structure, like "il y a" or using adjectives to describe a person. No, there were a little of those two things as well as identifying objects and places all thrown in together. Interesting.
I have to admit, though, I didn't do the same for the next class. The room is horrible for teaching, with chairs that are too close together (not to mention there's only a small piece of whiteboard for writing on that isn't covered by the screen where the PowerPoint appears). So instead, I just showed them the pairs on the PPT screen and did my "passez la vache" routine (I have a few small stuffed animals, including a "vache"--a cow, I use to let the students choose who I pick on next for an answer so I'm not always randomly calling on people--though I do do that occasionally, too) to have individual students find the commonalities, knowing which picture they were supposed to pair with. That worked okay for their level, too, though was probably not as much fun.
So today, I did let both classes do a group activity in researching a francophone country. There wasn't as much language learning as culture and general information learning, but I did let a few students sweat it out a bit thinking they had to present in French. That is, in the instructions up front, I didn't tell them they could do it in English, but as I went around answering questions, I let them know they could do it in English. Was that mean or strategic? I'm not sure. It might just have been forgetfulness. In any case, for both classes, I saw a lot of smiles, too. We all learned some interesting, some even totally random facts about countries with French-speaking populations. In the first class, we even had two who chose Morocco, and their presentations were still different enough to keep it interesting.
So, do I like group work? I say, bring it on. Let's do more of that good stuff!
Now, in spite of all of that, I didn't want to write just to tell about my student reviews. It's actually been a painful subject many times. But no, I bring it up now because of one of the positive things a student said, as well as a suggestion for improvement. The student wanted more group work. I found this interesting because we didn't have a whole lot of "group" group work last semester. We had a lot of pairing off by twos or threes if there weren't even numbers, but the few "group" group things we did were not as successful as I would have liked for a few reasons--mostly because there wasn't actually enough material for much interaction for those particular activities.
But I do like the idea of group work. I believe a lot of success can come from it, especially in language learning where students should be learning to communicate with real people rather than computer-based recordings. But language learning or other learning, I'm thinking that group work has one of the other benefits that I've looked to before--it stimulates positive emotions, and positive emotions lead to stronger memories.
Even though it's normal for people not to smile all the time, even if they're not necessarily unhappy, such as, particularly, when they're concentrating on something, I still really like seeing people smile, and maybe especially my students, but definitely people in general, too.
So let me tell you about a few group activities we did this week and how this all ties in. On Monday, we had what's called an "Info Gap" activity for which the instructions and set up were not great. There were a few ways it could have been done, but I interpreted it as an activity where the students were supposed to be partnered off, and each part of the pair had eight pictures that were different from the other partner's. They then, without looking at their partners' pictures, had to put the eight picture pairs together. The basic idea is fun. We did something similar in my Methods class last semester, which might have directed my perspective about how to accomplish it.
In any case, with 16ish in one class and 22ish in the other, it would have taken too long to pass out all of the tiny papers to everyone, so for the first class, I ended up putting them in groups instead of in pairs. And in spite of my misgivings about it, everyone seemed to like it. After it was over, I asked for a general satisfaction with the activity, thumbs up or thumbs down, and I got a lot of smiles and people saying it was fun. Whadda ya know? I think part of it was the opportunity to work with different people as well as some of the chances to use the language in different circumstances that led to this feedback. Based on my own thinking about the activity on Saturday night as I studied the picture groups, that's the only conclusion I can come up because with their level of French, it would have been a little tricky to do the activity as designed. It wasn't one of the typical learning exercises for this early in the year--that is, the picture pairs' similarities didn't fit neatly into the same basic grammatical structure, like "il y a" or using adjectives to describe a person. No, there were a little of those two things as well as identifying objects and places all thrown in together. Interesting.
I have to admit, though, I didn't do the same for the next class. The room is horrible for teaching, with chairs that are too close together (not to mention there's only a small piece of whiteboard for writing on that isn't covered by the screen where the PowerPoint appears). So instead, I just showed them the pairs on the PPT screen and did my "passez la vache" routine (I have a few small stuffed animals, including a "vache"--a cow, I use to let the students choose who I pick on next for an answer so I'm not always randomly calling on people--though I do do that occasionally, too) to have individual students find the commonalities, knowing which picture they were supposed to pair with. That worked okay for their level, too, though was probably not as much fun.
So today, I did let both classes do a group activity in researching a francophone country. There wasn't as much language learning as culture and general information learning, but I did let a few students sweat it out a bit thinking they had to present in French. That is, in the instructions up front, I didn't tell them they could do it in English, but as I went around answering questions, I let them know they could do it in English. Was that mean or strategic? I'm not sure. It might just have been forgetfulness. In any case, for both classes, I saw a lot of smiles, too. We all learned some interesting, some even totally random facts about countries with French-speaking populations. In the first class, we even had two who chose Morocco, and their presentations were still different enough to keep it interesting.
So, do I like group work? I say, bring it on. Let's do more of that good stuff!
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