Cycle 1 phase II

Day 18, 27 April 2011

Feedback day! I brought all the monitoring forms and read aloud only the suggestions, the evaluators wrote on the forms. They students asked me not to call out names so I shared the feedback by calling out only the group names. I realized that the feedback was more general (for example, give more arguments or ideas not relevant). The evaluators had not given individual feedback in most of the cases. Overall, there are quite a few things that I learned for my next cycle.

Day 17, 26 April 2011

The task was much easier today. My students knew more clearly what they will do in today’s class so I didn’t need to say much. They were all sitting in groups when I went to the class today. I just assigned the group names and topics and everyone began the discussion. I was now charged up to monitor individual groups. In some cases I found that one or two members were not contributing to the discussion. So I stood at their back pointing at them while my face was towards the evaluators and gave non-verbal cues to the evaluators to probe the individuals. Also some evaluators were having problems in filling the forms so I made a few clarifications. I collected all the forms once the discussion was over and told the students that they’ll get the feedback tomorrow.

Day 16, 25 April 2011

As planned, I carried out AR cycle 1, but this time the focus was speaking skills (phase II). I first decided to form groups today, but once again thing didn’t go as planned. I thought of conducting group discussions with 9 groups, but there were only 7 complete groups present today. In other groups, there were one or two absentees so I decided to go with 7 groups only. I first made them sit and then randomly asked 3 – 4 students t to sit with the groups and evaluated the group discussion. One member from each group came and picked two pieces of paper: one having a group name and the other, the discussion topic. Then I quickly explained the monitoring form to the evaluators and told them what they were supposed to do.

First 10 minutes, the groups spent on planning the discussion and then the discussion began. While groups were engaged in discussion, I moved around in each group to learn if everyone was on task. For sure this is much more tiring. I didn’t even complete one round of monitoring each group and I was already exhausted…phew! But I could see the groups taking part in the discussion. I also found the evaluators (students) probing the group for further clarification. I was satisfied with the fact that most students were involved in the activity, but my classroom looked much messed up today. Since we have fixed benches and it is not possible to sit in a big round, the groups were sitting of the benches whereas the students evaluating the discussion sat on the front desks so that they could face the group. I planned to audio record some of the discussions by leaving the recorder with the participating groups, but some group members were quite reluctant, so I decided not to record them. At least the discussions gave more time to students to improve their speaking skills. I didn’t share any group markings or feedback with the class today as I plan to do that once I complete the next round of discussions tomorrow.