Techniques Used by the Teacher Which Demonstrate Classroom Power - Coursework Example

Linguistic Reports Report room Power The purpose of this report is to design an observationtask which will be used by the teacher in a classroom situation to activities which demonstrate classroom power. The activity to be used in the assessment of classroom power will be role playing. The task will be based on observation of some teaching techniques used by the teacher which demonstrate classroom power. Classroom power is a concept which is used to imply to cases where the student is given a say in the learning activities. In this case, the teacher acts as a guide while the student undertakes to perform specific tasks. The class where this activity will be used has thirteen students. The students then select the roles which they have the ability to play by analyzing their strengths and capability and also their talents. This activity enables the students to exercise their powers as they are able to explore their potential and produce what the teachers cannot explore by instructions. Rationale for use of this task Role play is a very involving task as it requires the student to develop and explore the skills which are depicted in another character. As such, it helps the students to develop critical thinking. Critical thinking can also be enhanced through this method where students are faced with challenges during their role play and they are required to make major decisions. The learner learns to appreciate feedback given by the teacher since the feedback given here results into overt and instant changes in the role played by the learner. This task is also very effective in helping the learner to adapt to new environments and always adjust their actions incase those actions are not yielding the expected results. This task will also be effective in this exercise as it involves interactions of students in groups of five. As such, interaction between students will be enhanced. While role play teaches lessons which are learned in class, most other lessons can be incorporated where the learners learns moral lessons which can be applied in the society. Above all, role play gives the students the power to control their actions, explore their capabilities and deliver results according to the instructions given by the teacher during monitoring. Role playing During this exercise, the students are presented with a situation in which each member of the group is to pick a role which they are going to act with the help of the teacher. The situation which the students are supposed to act is taken from the learning objectives of the students so that the students are able to understand the text properly. In that text, the students assume different roles of the characters in the text. Assessment of students in this case is done based on the capacity of the students to attend the roles assumed and how the roles are delivered according to the specific learning concepts (Boud & Falchikov, 2006). Our role play will involve the study of Shakespeare’s Antigone. In this play, students will be helped by their teacher to choose specific roles which they will play according to the instructions which align with the learning objectives and the learning instructions. The purpose of using this task is so that the learners are able to command their own learning by taking on new roles which they are supposed to imitate or act exactly or better than the characters in the play. This activity is linked to specific themes and concepts which are given to the learners as their expected learning outcomes (Wilson, 2008). The roles to be assumed by the learners is selected based on the amount of time the class has to cover the tasks, other than the acting, the other materials expected from the learner such as research on the character, report or presentations, whether or not the students will co-role play or each student will role play on a given section alone, or where the teacher wants to introduce a complication in the play such as a challenge or a conflict. Antigone is a play which has many challenges and conflict. As such, the students are required to co-play in the stage by portraying different and conflicting views. Conflicts and complexity in the role play is one way in which the students are able to command their own power in the tasks. This is ensured by allowing the students to take rigid stands in various issues in the play (Boud & Falchikov, 2006). This task was very effective as a teaching strategy to assess for classroom power. This is because the students were given a practical opportunity to show their power and responsibility with regards to the roles they were supposed to play in the text. The students were able to develop practical skills and learn how to express themselves in different characters. This task also enabled the learners to show their capabilities of being diverse and explorative on their own, which helps them in learning of life challenges and complexities and how to deal with them. However, this task cannot be used in the classroom situation for most of the activities since the task takes a lot of time to plan and develop. Furthermore, the students need a lot of dedication which may take the dedication the students could behave dedicated to other learning cases. In order for this task to be effective, the learner needs to be willing to participate and be brave enough. As such, the shy learners may have a hard time dealing with this type of task. This task can be enhanced by capacity building first so that the learners are motivated intrinsically to participate in these activities (Wilson, 2008). Report 2: Managing Pair and Group Work This report purposes to design an observation task which will be used by the teacher in a classroom situation. This observational task is used in assessing the management of pair and group work. The task will be based on observation of classroom interactions and learning outcomes of the learner. The classroom where this observational task will be used has thirteen students. The class is mixed; both boys and girls are taught in this class. The task will be performed by dividing the students in pairs which each pair containing a boy and a girl. As for the group work, the students work in teams of five members with each team having at least two members of the same gender. The allocation of time for presentation of each pair or group is allocated such that each person gets the same amount of time to represent the team for example, a task done by a pair where they are given fifteen minutes to present their work means that one of them will have seven minutes and the other one will have eight minutes. This should be avoided as the amount of time allocated for each grout should be divisible by the amount of members the pair or the groups has. Rationale for use of this task This task has been chosen since it provides the learning process from a learner’s point of view. The use of groups work or pair work facilitates interactive learning activities where students work together to reach the instructional objectives. It helps the students to become experts a particular part of their tasks and then share with each other through discussions. It teaches students to become responsible of their own learning by allowing them the opportunity to explore the instructional materials they are learning and become experts in it. Although the product of their work varies from students to students, the most important part of this learning method is that every student develops some level of responsibility (Slavin, 1995). According to Lewis and Hill who claim (1992:17), pair and group work is essential in language learning as it ensures the learning process is natural and relaxed. This is ensured by allowing the students to work with each other. Observation task The observational task to be used in this report is the vocabulary pair or group work activity where students will be divided in to pair and then in groups on order to learn the meaning of new words. The students take their turns in explaining the meaning of words to each other. The task should be very effective if the students do not know the meaning of the vocabulary or the referents of those words are not in their immediate environment. This provides the need to learn the vocabularies with a lot of motivation. Students should engage in brainstorming which allows them to share ideas about the possible meaning or use of a particular word. Each group was given ten vocabularies which they were supposed to learn their meaning. Each group had five students and the words were divided into chunks such that each student gets to research two words each. Each student was given a day to research the meaning of the vocabulary and come the following group meeting with the meaning and the application of the word in actual sense. After the students meet and exchange the own points, each student has expert knowledge about the areas they were supposed to research as they had thoroughly researched two vocabularies. Then then teach each other in a way they understand between themselves. At the end of the learning process, the learner is able to understand the meaning of ten words without having to research all of them. Furthermore, this method enables the learners to get clarification and emphasis from their won peers and they get a point of reference any time they need to clarify a vocabulary which was taught by a student. These impacts a level of discipline in the learners as they are aware that they are not only learning for themselves, but other students also depend on the knowledge. This observational task was very effective in learning of vocabularies. It enabled each student to develop expert knowledge on two vocabularies and also sharing of information with the other member which impacts on the level of responsibility of the learner. This method of learning provides avenues through which the assessment of the learners is made based on the individual performance and also group performance. Members of a group or a team are able to be assessed individually as the teacher is able to provide that each student in the team have their own study as a contribution to the team. Thus, individual assessment is done by reviewing the length and depth of individual research, providing for individual reports and tests after team learning. This gives all the students the fair mark with diligent students getting the value for their work (Slavin, 1995). Group assessment is also effectively done in both the process and the product. The learning objectives are assessed as they progress and when finally they are complete. Peer evaluation is also integrated into the assessment where team members evaluate their personal contributions (Slavin, 1995). This task is very effective in recording of the observations made on the students. However, the task should be remolded into a task which can be assessed in both process and product. In this case, vocabulary learning is not a feasible task where the teacher is interested in assessing both process and the product of the assignment. This is very important as some of the assignments which are finished poorly may have a very good start and vice versa and that is why the teachers need to assess how the learner arrived at a particular conclusion. This will be taken into consideration for change during the next assignment. Bibliography Boud, D. & Falchikov, N. 2006. Aligning assessment with long-term learning. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 31(4), 399-413. Slavin, R. E. 1995. Cooperative learning: Theory, research, and practice (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Tierney, R. (1995) Reading Strategies and Practices. Boston: Allyn & Bacon Wilson, L. 2008. Practical Teaching A Guide to PTLLS and CTLLS. London Cengage Learning. Appendix 1: Learning observation for task 1 The number of students in the classroom power observation was about 13 students and the task was in 23 questions and I was just ticking (T) for teacher (S) for student and (T/S) for both and finally the department was the of question number 4. The questions and answers for the observations are presented as follows. 1. Who chose the aims? T chose it indirectly informed by the book. 2. Who chose the language and/or skills focus? T chose it indirectly. 3. Who chose the topic(s) and activities? T chose the table activity. 4. Who chose and prepared the materials? The department chose it. 5. Who chose the seating arrangements? S come to class and sit wherever they want to sit but some comes late and T put him/her in a table or group. 6. Who wrote on the board? T wrote some vocabulary/activity by some Ss answers. 7. Who cleaned the board? T cleaned the board when she goes to other activity. 8. Whom did the students speak to? S speaks to T by answering her question or gives some explanation. 9. Who created the pairs and the groups? T asks S to work in pairs. 10. Who decided when to stop an activity? T gives a few minute for an activity and stop when it finish. 11. Who operated the equipment? T operated the course book on projector. 12. Who decided which questions or problems in the lesson were explored? T gives an example of grammar like in future tense and she finds out that Ss have problem with other tenses so T focus on the grammar next lesson. 13. Who chose the vocabulary to be learned? T gives Ss about 10 words from the lesson. 14. Who gave the meaning for words? T asks S what does the word mean and S gives the meaning and if S doesn’t know or give it wrong T will correct it. 15. Who spelled out new words? T spell it, but Ss do when the T asks them. 16. Who gave explanations? T asks S to explain or try to explain. 17. Who asked questions? T asks all questions 18. Who answered student’s questions? T does. 19. Who repeated what was said if others did not hear it? When T spells the word she repeats it too. 20. Who created the silence? T monitors the class and Ss when they in pairs. 21. Who broke the silence? T 22. Who checked the work? T/S 23. Who chose the homework? Ts balance the homework and give it sometimes. Appendix 2: Learning observation for task 2 This task was well taken by the students even at the beginning of the task. This is because the students are already used to working together in some other assignments before this one. The students researched their vocabularies thoroughly and were able to teach the rest of the team. There was efficient interaction between the students and the assessment of this task revealed that the learners leant what the other team members taught. Read More