At 10 am on Monday, I followed Sana's introductory group one grammar class with Alexandra Ramos' group 3A composition class in the same classroom. I tried to add a little variety to my Classroom Observations by observing different levels, and I think this helped me a great deal, because the tone and lessons of the group 1 grammar class were completely different than Ms. Ramos' Group 3 composition class.
Ms. Ramos is a very intelligent and diligent teacher. She had a large class, but every singe student seemed to have an excellent report with her that I really admired. She began the class by lowering the affective filter by asking about everyone's weekend. I know that I must blog about this a lot, but I really value this aspect in teachers because students can really tell when the teacher doesn't care. If the teacher is genuinely interested in the students' lives and weekends, the students will be more open to learning and completing the lesson.
Ms. Ramos passed out a very interesting article about a government program in Mexico that allowed artists to pay their taxes by producing art. I had never heard about this before, and I became very interested in the subject, as I think other students in the class did so as well. She was going with more of a timed reading approach, where she gave students a select amount of time to read the article (which was quite difficult in reading level), and then she would ask the opinions of the students regarding their views. By doing this, Ms. Ramos was encouraging top down reading for her higher level students, which is the same kind of reading they will be doing when they get to a collegiate level. I found this very helpful.
Overall, I was most struck by how different this class was from Sana's class, but I found both their techniques appropriate for the different levels that they were teaching.
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