Reflective Journal: 1. Lesson Observation

My friend S (letter of the post before last) was quite right in saying a "Reflective Journal" was a learning tool. Not just a personal option, but a part of the assessment criteria of DiTLLS. I was going to write this blog just for me - and anyone else who happened upon it - but as I have to keep a similar log of the course anyway, and there's soooo much to do, I'm not going to write it twice. So from now on, this is my official Trainee Teacher Reflective Journal. It might not be as frank now as it would otherwise have been... but then again, why not?
So, official reflection No 1:
Last Wednesday I sat in on (not sure if technically this was "observing" or "shadowing") a Literacy class taught by my subject specialist mentor, Laura. As I said before, Laura's a delightful woman - calm, warm, humorous and cogent; her classroom style reflected all of these traits and made me wonder if I could ever emulate them. Especially the calmness!
There were eight learners; two women 30+, one younger Portugese woman (unusual, as she would normally be in an ESOL - English for Speakers of Other Languages - class), three young men, one of whom could have been at school and two in perhaps their very late teens. Then there was an older woman in a wheelchair, brought in by a member of college staff, and Sue, a woman on crutches (a permanent disability) who came in late having burned her hand trying to pour a cup of tea and been bandaged by the nurse. An older man, (Teaching Assistant?) sat near the boys and... assisted.
The subject of the class was Nouns - Common and Proper. Laura explained to me that one of her other objectives was to check out the abilities of some of the learners as she has recently taken over this class and is not convinced that all members have attained the Level 1 skills that they are supposed to have. She started the class with a word grid on the whiteboard, from which everyone was asked to make up words of 4 or more letters, always including an S. While they were working on this, Laura took the register and would have put up the Learning Objectives for the class on the Powerpoint screen - but it failed to work. She called a technician, who came, but all he could do was order a new bulb!
Undeterred, Laura went back to the results of the word grid. Most had quite some difficulty with this and Laura negotiated her way through misspelt words, words which included letters other than those she had put up, and other issues.  But clearly they all enjoyed and engaged with the exercise, and either learned or consolidated information. Laura continually asked gentle questions to ascertain that they had got it, and praised everyone for whatever she could. The ablest learner was one of the young men; the two disabled women possibly had the most difficulty grasping concepts.
Technology having failed, nouns were addressed on the whiteboard; what they were, how to identify them. Again, it took some time for most of the class to get to grips with this - but Laura found different ways to clarify and gave out handouts for one-to-one working - underline the nouns in sentences, basically. As Sue was having difficulty writing with her bandaged hand, I was tasked with helping her, which gave me a chance to understand what sort of ability she was working at. On the one hand, it seemed, she had neat writing and could spell reasonably well (especially words relating to football: David Beckham, Manchester United!); on the other her conceptual capacity was limited and she sometimes suggested adverbs or adjectives might be nouns. I think she gained some clarity from my explanations, and felt we struck up a bit of a rapport.
After this exercise, all the other learners went off to work on (differentiated, I assumed) tasks on the classroom PCs. They all seemed familiar with the technology and happy to use it. Laura asked me to keep working with Sue as she had to do a test which would normally involve listening to passages on a headset, but she thought it would work better if I read (and reread and reread) the necessary passages. It was interesting for me to find out what sort of Literacy was involved; I read short texts involving discussions (who said/thought what), descriptions (a car accident - put the events in order)), someone's work history (dates and time order - embedded numeracy!) and Sue had to answer multiple choice questions about the content. She got the first one right and when she was hesitant about the second one, I read it to her several more times (this was permitted!), but trying to emphasise what she needed to understand. I even started to give her a hint, but quickly realised that I was not supposed to be helping her learn, at this point. Her learning was being formally assessed and any help I gave would skew the results. I played it straight for the rest of the test; she got most of the answers wrong.
The class came together briefly at the end - Laura having been working with the others on their individual PC-based tasks while I'd been with Sue. Everyone seemed to have enjoyed it and feel they'd achieved something. They all wrote something at the end -  possibly a summary of what they'd learned - and while doing so, Sue asked Laura what "that lady"'s name was (mine) - which felt like something of a compliment.
So what did I take away from my experience?
In terms of content, in a Literacy class of this level a little goes a long way (this applies to my Microteach, too - even with highly intelligent learners).
Patience is a virtue.
Always have a Plan B for technology
There's a difference between teaching and assessment. And perhaps my experience with Sue was an illustration between Formative (ongoing) Assessment and Summative (final) Assessment. Formative Assessment can include continued teaching, using feedback to understand what learners know and don't know, and filling gaps; Summative Assessment has to be a stand alone process that evaluates exactly what the learner does and doesn't know at this particular moment in time.
I liked Laura's teaching style, which was egalitarian, warm and sympathetic but with an underlying authority which I imagine would be quite unassailable in the face of disruptive behaviour. The wheelchair learner came the closest to being "difficult", and Laura dealt with her reasonably but firmly. It felt like it came from a depth of self-possession and a wealth of experience. Obviously I don't have the teaching experience, but can I draw on comparable resources? I guess my microteach is going to reveal some of the answer.