On September 14, my friend April Tan observed my teaching in my class Ross 125. As a part of the homework, students had to research and find facts about their organization or a campus place and also think of the audience and purpose for writing an essay about their organization. We played a game which involved students describing their purpose, audience and a couple interesting facts about their audience. A part of this game was that students after they informally present their organization, they tag another student in the class. Other students while participating had to take notes about what they learned about the students’ organization. According to April’s comments, apart from the intent of students’ understanding the purpose and audience for their essays, the activity provided students to involve collaboratively in a fun way to hone their presentation skills and held them accountable as they had to actively listen to what the speaker had to say. When I was asking questions to understand student’s approach to write their papers, April noticed that at times I used close-ended questions like asking, “Will you be able to engage your reader?” instead of “How will you engage your reader”?

I believe the reason I do this at times is I have so many things planned for the day, and If I fall a bit behind my schedule, I try to speed through things. Nonetheless, I have taken this fallacy into account and have left about a few extra minutes for every activity in my lesson plans henceforth, so that everything has a perfect pace and presentations do not feel rushed.

After our informal presentations, I introduced students to a different approach to writing an essay based on Ken Macrorie’s book, The I-Search Paper. Learning about this method in our English 500 class, I thought it would be a great way to help students start their research papers. Modeling my paper on Farm-house museum and using this style, I was able to demonstrate the process. April thought that it was a great way to portray my work to students, and also provide them with more resources. Though she commented that it was a bit challenging to read due to the font size. I have changed a few things in my class since then. When there is a large amount of text to be displayed, I use printouts and use Elmo to display the text, instead of using my laptop to connect to the projector.

Technological glitches have always been a challenging and frustrating aspect and have at times impacted my teaching. Times when things don’t work or when I get distracted, I get flustered and April noticed that I cut my sentences short and do not finish what I have to say. After pondering on this, I have started incorporating plan B in my lesson plans. Instead of relying completely on one aspect of technology, I now have alternate strategies and techniques to engage my students. If things do not still work, I take a deep breath, and hand over printouts in small groups and ask them to think about strategies to incorporate the style used in papers.

Motivating and engaging students in an early morning class is something I find I have to work really hard on. Most of my students take a heavy load of credits and they complain that they find it difficult to wake up and come for the class as they are unable to get adequate sleep. I usually have to start my class with some fun activity that ties with English 150 concepts. So at the beginning of the class period, students were actively engaged in the game, and then in the last 20 minutes of the class, when I was using slides to present some important concepts, I switched off the lights for a better projection effect. April recommended that I should not switch the lights completely because that they may lead to cause drowsiness and take away their focus from the concepts that are being taught. In my opinion, that was a great feedback suggestion, and I keep the lights on. That way, I can also observe my students.

All the aforementioned recommendations that April provided benefitted my classroom and helped me adopt some new strategies. Her positive comments about the efforts I took for my class including extensive preparation of the materials, arriving early enough and projecting my day’s agenda and sharing copious resources with my class were gratifying. I am truly thankful to her for observing my early morning class and provide me with such great feedback.