planning again

Day 15, 21 April 2011
A few conscious decisions I made: one, no more structured/planned group presentations (as students focus more towards memorizing content in English), second, group discussion rather than presentation (so that they experience something new). Finally, 5 for 1 (I mean 5 evaluators for each group) to keep it rather unbiased (if that’s what students think). Keeping in view the previous speaking lessons I had to take these decisions. Obviously I could anticipate issues/difficulties even here like if I carry out group discussions, how I will deal with the classroom organization? How I will monitor each group more effectively? What kind of feedback they will get?

First I’ve designed a group monitoring form that both me and one other students (whose not part of the group being evaluated) will use during the group discussion. The evaluation sheet includes space for writing group and group members’ name and an open ended question at the end that the evaluators will use to write their feedback for a particular group. The evaluation is broadly on the basis on content, participation, manner, communication. The student evaluator will mark on a scale of 1 to 5 which I’ll later marks from an average of 10. Since there are 17 groups of 5-7 members each, I’ll ask each group to pick one small piece of paper that has an alphabet written on it so that each group has a name. I’ve pre-selected nine different topics (all argumentative) and will ask one member from each group to randomly pick a piece of paper. I intend to select four students as evaluators for one group each whereas I’ll be the fifth evaluator who will move around in each group. The plan is to carry out group discussion with 9 groups on the first and 8 groups on the second day. The students who are not among the groups participating in the discussion will act as evaluators for that particular day. I do think that I’ll have to go through the monitoring form with the students before I give it to them for actual use. It all looks lengthy, but I’m hoping that if I carefully follow the steps as per plan, I will achieve the aims set for the lesson. Good luck to me!