Ben - CO #2

Today I had the pleasure of sitting in on Vicky Ledbetter's Group 1B speaking class. The very first thing I noticed about the way that Vicky handles class is her incredibly positivity. The feeling in the room was very relaxed and friendly and all of the students seemed genuinely excited about learning. She knew all of their names and they responded extremely well to her personality. At the beginning of the class, all of the students introduced themselves to me, which gave them an opportunity to practice some of the vocabulary they had been learning and I got to know each and every one of them a little bit. On top of that, Vicky had some fantastic teaching methods. We had discussed the idea of "beautiful mistakes" the other day in out TEFL class, and Vicky implemented a beautiful mistakes log for students to keep track of their mistakes and corrections. I was only there for one class, but I picked up that she keeps track of these logs and makes sure that her students are consistently working on them. The next activity was a very fun game in which one student stood in front of the whiteboard, Vicky wrote two words on the board behind them so they could not see, and then the rest of the students had to provide clues to help the person at the board guess. This game was great because it encouraged the students to come up with ways to describe these words. They were working on their speaking and their vocabulary simultaneously, and they had a great time doing it.
Towards the end of class I was included in an activity where students were put into pairs and partners had to describe their house for their partner to draw. Vicky walked around the room providing feedback and making sure that the students were speaking in English the entire time. If she overhead some common mistakes she would write them on the whiteboard and then after the activity was over she would go over why the students had made those mistakes. One thing that was great about that was she gave the students the opportunity to correct their peer's mistakes themselves. In the end, the biggest takeaway I got from Vicky's class was the positivity and production. She did a phenomenal job of teaching a lot of valuable material whilst maintaining an incredibly positive and fun learning environment.