Observation report-1

1. 1. Observation Report 1 Intermediate Reading and Composition David Atterberry

01/19/12 There were 16 students in class on the day I observed. The class took place in
Kolthoff 139. Class started by the students exchanging their homework journal writings.
They were instructed to read and respond to their partner’s journal entry. The students
wrote independently for about ten minutes before the students exchanged journals again
and read the response their partner wrote to them. After a couple minutes to read the
responses, the teacher asked the whole class if anyone said anything funny or surprising.
The teacher called on individual students to talk about what they read briefly. I thought
this activity was a good way to get the creative juices flowing in class. While the topic of
the journal writing was personal (what did you do last weekend?), the writing seemed to
serve as a way for students to practice producing written work while not being afraid of
making mistakes (as the journals were not “corrected” but discussed). I could see the
journal exchanging being good for class rapport as well because it allowed students to
interact with classmates in a casual, personal way. Even as a native speaker, I found free-
writing/journal writing tasks in my English classes to be beneficial, if only to “clear my
creative spring” as one of my professors once put it. After the journal activity, students
were put into four groups to go over their homework assignment. The teacher numbered
the students off to put them in groups. I found this method of grouping to be quick and
effective, although I would vary the way I made groups over the semester to ensure a
variety of groupings. The students were asked to compare their answers to the homework
and come up with a consensus for each question. The homework questions were about a
reading in their textbook about advertising. Students were also asked to justify their
answers based on the reading. While listening in on the group discussions, I noticed they
were doing a great job defending their answer choices by using the text. After about 8
minutes of group discussions, the class came together and the teacher gave each group
four cards labeled A-D to denote each of the possible answers to each question. The
teacher then asked each group to hold up the letter of their answer to each question. If the
group was correct, they received a point (written on the board). For each question the
class discussed why they chose the answer they did, whether it was correct or not. This
discussion seemed to lead to a closer analysis of the text they had read in their books. The
students seemed to enjoy the homework correction game; it seemed like a fun way to
examine the students’ work, and the activity lead to some good discussion of the text and
vocabulary. Later in the lesson, students were shown a series of commercials via Youtube
that corresponded with ads they read about in their textbook. After each commercial, the
class would discuss why the ad would be successful or unsuccessful and where they
thought the ad was shown. They were making some great connections between culture
and advertising. The students were shown three different McDonald’s ads from three
different countries and asked to write in their journals for a couple minutes about what