Learning from Peer Observation

As  professors, we should be always looking for new strategies to improve our teaching methods and to boost our student's learning process. However, sometimes it's difficult to analyze ourselves and to see what we are doing wrong or what can be improved, or simple to "give advice ourselves." That's when peer observation comes into play, since you may have some else to observe you and to give you feedback.

 

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had to plan and teach a culture based class, and as part of this assignment,  we had to peer observe. And I have to say that it was a very interesting and worthy experience for me as a professor, and also as an observer. In the first case, it was very worthy since I had the opportunity of getting feedback from another professional, and in the second case because I was the one who could attentively observe and analyze my coworker's class, and then give the corresponding feedback.

Another interesting aspect of peer observation is that it is not only for giving feedback for our coworkers, but learning from them,too. For example, the day I went to observe my coworker's class, I learnt a lot.! That's because the class I attended was one of elementary school,they were first graders. I have always worked with teenagers and adults, so you can imagine I don't know much about teaching English to very young children. Something I learned was about the strategies the professor used to control discipline and to catch her student's attention; she used songs! every time kids started to get disorganized, she started singing, and a two second later all kids were singing and looking at her! This was very interesting for me since I had always wondered how primary professors got  their young students  to pay attention, I mean, I imagine that young kids always want to play, right? 

Besides, I also learned about the class content, too. For this class, the professor had prepared a wonderful class about traditional games around the world, and it was just great! I really loved her class.

She first started by asking kids about the traditional games they knew, and then, she started explaining them about one in particular, "Marbles". In her class, there were several students whose native country was not Costa Rica, and so she asked them if they played marbles in their respective countries: some of them said yes, but there were others who said that they did not know anything about marbles. It was so interesting to see little six or seven years old kids talking about marbles!. Well, to make a long story short, the professor then explained how to play marbles, and set up a space in the middle of the classrooms for kids to experience it for real. They all had the chance to learn and play marbles, and you could see in their faces and their big smiles that they just loved that class!

Marvin Mendez B

ESL Professor

Universidad Nacional

Encouraging Multicultural Students

Encouraging multicultural students

    In the previous post I shared with you about cultural encounters which can be really meaningful for students when studying another culture. Now, I will tell you a little bit about culture capsules.

Culture capsules are one of the best–established and best–known methods for teaching culture. A culture capsule is essentially a brief description of some aspect of a particular culture; for example, the food eaten in particular place. Besides, it usually includes a comparison with the student's native culture. These small projects usually involve the students carrying out some research, and then presenting the findings orally to the rest of the class. What I like most about this technique is that if you plan it carefully, your students will have the opportunity to learn many different cultural aspects in just one class. For example, I myself used this technique for one assignment of a course in my Master's, Second Language and Target Culture. The assignment consisted of planning a cultural class and then teaching it, and it also involved peer observation. So, for my culturally planning, I chose to plan a project for my class about one of the topics we were studying “ Food.” For this topic I usually taught vocabulary related to food like vegetables, groceries, fruits, dairy products, etc, and grammar about countable and uncountable nouns; however, this time I included the “culture capsules project” and it really made my class much more interesting and enjoyable.

Basically, For this project , the students had the follow the following guidelines:

1. Work in small groups, three persons each.
2. Choose a country, and research about the food most commonly eaten by its inhabitants.
3. Prepare a power point presentation in which they explained the underlying factors why people eat those foods.
4. Choose a particular dish, and bring it to class to share it with their classmates.

At first, they were kind of surprised about the project, but then they got really excited, and when the day of the presentation came, they really had fun and learn a lot. They presented about four countries: China, France, Italy and Mexico, and they all enjoy the presentations, especially when they started sharing the food they had brought!

Besides, when I asked them about how they had like the activity, they all agreed that it was very interesting learning about the food from other countries. They also mentioned that it was much better than just studying vocabulary and grammar.

So, as you can see it is not so difficult to encourage students to learn about other cultures.

Marvin Mendez B

EFL Professors

Universidad Nacional

Costa Rica.

Cultural Encounters

Cultural Encounters

Teaching Culture in our EFL classroom! How? That's the question many educators have when they are told that culture should be also taught. I myself had the same question, and usually wondered how to include cultural topics in my conversational English class. Besides, I always claimed that I did not have enough time to teach culture because there was too much grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary that I needed to cover in a certain period of time. However, now I think it's not that difficult, and in fact, culture can boost student's learning process. This is because by teaching culture, educators can make their classes more dynamic, interesting, and enjoyable for students.

There are lots of strategies professors can use to teach something about the target culture, USA culture in our case, or about any other culture around the world. In future posts, I will be sharing with you some of the strategies that you can use to start promoting not only bilingual students but and multicultural students. In this particular post, I want to share with you about one activity which I consider to be the most powerful and meaningful for students, multicultural encounters.

I myself had the pleasure of experiencing it. Some weeks ago, I had the opportunity to share with three guest speakers during a class in one of my Master's courses. One of the speakers was from Texas, USA, and she shared with us many aspects about Texas's culture and her particular culture. The other two speakers were from Germany, and they shared some particular aspects of Germany Culture as well.

It's wonderful how much you can learn about a culture when you have the opportunity to engage in a conversation with a person from that culture. Sometimes, when we are researching about a culture in books or the Internet, there are certain peculiarities that even we professors cannot fully understand since we are still outsiders to that culture. That's when we see how useful and rewarding can a cultural encounter be since sharing directly with subjects from the culture under study will allow students to have a deeper and more complete understanding. That's why I really encourage you to plan this kind of activities for your classes, I can assure you that your students will really love it.

Marvin Mendez

EFL Professor

Universidad Nacional