Activity 5: Partner Professional Dialogue and observation report.

Activity 5 represented the opportunity to work collaboratively with a colleague reflecting on my teaching practice. I am grateful because my colleague was willing to spend part of her time helping me out in order to complete my assignment. Teaching is an ongoing process; teachers are always developing skills and abilities to further growth of themselves and those they are in contact with. Hence the importance of continuously evaluate the teaching practice. Collaborative work is not an easy task as there are setbacks such as schedules and workload of team members and it requires emotional maturity to recognize that our job still has room for improvement.

The analysis was conducted taking the five Standards for Effective Pedagogy as reference, which describe the ideal conditions for instruction, something crucial for my student who are at-risk of educational failure.

Contextualization

According to Lave, learning is a function of the activity, context and culture in which it occurs; it means that is situated. Hence the importance of taking into account the community where students revolve. In my point of view, Community Involvement begins at the moment of carrying out the Need Analysis. Such analysis allows identifying participant's needs and characteristics. It becomes very difficult to promote parent involvement due to the fact that this Center's population attends at various different times (according to programmed therapies) and it is difficult to accommodate around their work schedules. However the following approaches were attempted: Provided feedback to Parents about their children progress by telephone contact, or in the case of those children who are dropped off by the Parent a small conference was provided at the end of the class. I think, with my job, parents’ involvement has remained at an informative stage without reaching a collaborative work where they could help in the design of the content of the classes. I could increase the amount of involvement by giving presentations by the students of the material covered during the course, and establishing more communication with them.

I think it is important to promote learning establishing the connections between contents and the context in which participants revolve because this approach allows participants to utilize prior knowledge and interests to reach their needs. For that reason all given topics will be developed around the students' context: Me, my family, my school, my community, the world. I try to connect the content unit to students’ prior knowledge and experiences by means of eliciting from students the connection at the beginning of the topic, asking students for feedback about it, and to provide opinions.

One example of contextualization is the “Easter Festival Project”. The”Centro de Integración Juvenil” is not part of the Secretaría de Educación, therefore we didn’t have the “Semana Santa” break. It was difficult for me to tell the students that we would have classes because I did not want to cause a negative impact on their motivation. Thinking on that, I proposed them to carry out an Easter Festival and attendance was not mandatory. I was thrilled when the majority of the students voluntarily attended.

Language Development

Each content will focus to different social practices of the language, thus establishing the complexity of this language and it is a tool to communicate and procure knowledge. For example, through the activities developed during the Easter Festival students receive information about culture and at the same time they have the opportunity to practice different language skills: listening and reading legends and songs, singing, working with patterns, practicing vocabulary playing Bingo, lotería, playing roles in a square dance, and writing the name of the food. 

The idea that emerged from the reflective practice was to encourage students to utilize the dictionary whenever an unknown word is encountered, and do not expect the teacher to provide all answers, and elaborate their own dictionary.

Joint Productive Activities

Working with projects is a good way to promote collaborative work between teacher and students producing together. However, in my case there have been very few instances in which the students are allowed to decide about class activities. Generally, as a teacher I bring the activities all planned. I think I should allow the students to proposed class activities from time to time, and let them to provide feedback about which activities they have enjoyed the most.

After reviewing the lesson plans for the “Easter Festival Project” the elaboration of a wall display could be suggested to students in which Teacher-Students would decide sections, content, and distribution worked out as a team.

Challenging Activities

All activities are proposed as a task to complete, but I think that something is not working in my planning because the student's own pace is not considered when planning the activities, and too many activities with very little time to complete them might become overwhelming. This end up being frustrating and discouraging to students.

Rhythm and Students' interests should be taken into consideration which would help in being more proactive and anticipate potential difficulties. Also it is important to encourage students to participate and turning activities into smaller steps to facilitate comprehension.

Other useful activities are those where a conversational model is given so students follow the model using their own information. This holds true when given a problem solving task as well.

Instructional Conversations

Activities are planned in small groups, and students are encouraged to participate by means of questioning them. During the actual practice the teacher-talking time is abused since students are not confident when questioned adding to the fact they must respond in English. Students are used to be told what to do. I would suggest team activities since this would promote Ss sharing their own point of view.

The most useful is to contextualize the classes; in this case we started from talking about a tradition to work different abilities in English. We start with the idea that each student will build its own learning as that student interacts with written and oral texts in English, accommodating this knowledge to its own personal experiences enriched by the interaction with other students.

The least useful activity was the learning of a song since most students found difficult to pronounce the lyrics with the rhythm required by the song. The song was not meaningful to adolescents' interests.

The Lesson Plan of one day (the project was developed during 4 classes)

Teacher: Claudia Andrea M. Mendez Fernandez						Date: April 13, 2012
Background information Institution:  “CENTRO DE INTEGRACIÓN JUVENIL”                Age: 13 to 16 years old Course       /   grade         /level                                       English      /    1           / secondary								Number of students: 10  Time: 2 hours
NAME OF THE PROJECT: the Easter festival                            NAME OF THE TASK: “Games”        CONTENT: recycled vocabulary (occupations, numbers 1-70,  days, months, everyday vocabulary), traditions (songs, Easter hunt food, games),
GOAL: Ø  Recognize the existence of other cultures and languages. Ø  Provide students with some basic classroom language that will enable them to communicate in English at all times during their foreign language lessons. Ø  Students develop respect and appreciation for diversity, acquire a positive attitude towards learning about different aspect of a foreign culture and recognize similarities and differences with their own culture.
By the end of the lesson students will: Ø  Respond to simple spoken and written language in linguistic and non-linguistic ways. Ø  Increase listening vocabulary related to cultural topics: traditions, hobbies and leisure time, drinks and food; review recycled vocabulary ( pronouns, occupations and numbers 1-70) Ø  Follow instructions given in the classroom. Ø  Demonstrate understanding about traditions. Ø  Use clues (illustrations, body language) to get the gist and some detail from spoken and written texts.
Language skills Reading:  reading strategies: guessing from contexts, body language and previous knowledge) Listening (vocabulary and fixed expressions around the topic, listen for detail, follow spoken instructions). Speaking: vocabulary around the topic. Writing: vocabulary about traditions.
Activity	Objective	Interaction & time		Material	Procedure		Notes		Reflective notes
Routines: Welcome circle	Greeting people	Group 10’		Posters	Routine to greeting the teacher and classmates at the beginning of the class.		Structure: Greetings: hi, hello; My name is ___; How are you? Responses: Fine; I’m fine; Great; nice to meet you; glad to meet you
Engage	traditions	Group 10’			Teacher asks questions about Easter Celebrations in Mexico. Ss watch video about Easter celebrations in America.				Students talk about their experiences and show knowledge about some elements of Easter egg hunt.
Explore	CULTURAL CAPSULE	Group 25’		Lap top Songs book	Ss listen an urban legend.		San Antonio Railroad tracks		Students show interest. After watching the video they try to explain the story. I make them notice that they can understand more information when listening.
Elaborate	Learn songs	Group 20 min.		Lap top copies	Read and listen lyrics. Students learn the songs.		Ten little monkeys, Skip to my Lou,		The song is not appealing to the students because is a song for preschoolers. It was  hard for them to pronounce the lyrics (to fast). They enjoy the square dance.
Practice	games	Group 40’		Games, craft paper, glue, markers	Ss play different games practicing vocabulary.		items bingo, numbers  BINGO, Easter Hunt		Students enjoy the bingo. Some students are more confident than others about recognizing the numbers when they hear them. One student tells that he always forget the numbers; I ask him the reason for no reviewing the numbers at home with the C.D. that I gave them, he tells that he doesn’t have computer at home.
Time for eating the food was not considered. Students were invited to read the food labels (popcorn, cupcakes, lemonade, drinks, cups, plates, napkins, etc.) and to write the vocabulary on their notebooks but students were more interested on eating.
Closing circle	Good Bye and what I have learned today		Group 10 min.	Poster with structure	Students tell vocabulary from the topic.		Structure: My name is __. Nice to meet you, My word is___ (from vocabulary) Good bye, see you tomorrow!			We didn’t have time for this activity.
Evaluate	Observation of students as they apply new concepts and skills. Teacher analyses after the lesson the results identifying student’s needs of support, level of motivation, participation and knowledge of the target vocabulary and the target structures.