Allison CO - 2

Having accidentally slept through her class last week, I was able to reschedule to observe Felicia's 2C reading class for Tuesday morning. Just like the video of her that we watched in class last week, Felicia is quite friendly and has a good control of her classroom. She appeared to be invested in the students' understanding of the material, which is always nice considering I know there are some teachers at FSU that aren't really like that.

Felicia began by writing down the itinerary on the whiteboard and took roll. There were a few students that came in late and knocked before coming in. Felicia instructed them that in the US, it is better to simply come in quietly so as to not draw attention away from the teacher. After this, Felicia shares a cordial conversation with her students as to what happened over the weekend. Students are quite relaxed with the teacher and even use some colloquialisms. A few new vocabulary words are brought up during this chat, including "rollercoaster". She wrote them down on the board. She caught a few gentleman having a side conversation in Arabic but quickly stopped it.

Keeping a moderate pace throughout the lesson, Felicia smoothly transitioned into discussing an article on immigration which the class had gone over in depth during their last meeting. She gave students the opportunity to review the material by reread the article before they began to talk about it. When she has the students explain the content, students are actively participating. However, for the most part, answers are being issued at random and almost no one raises their hand. Felicia does correct errors and they are all done orally.

Once she feels the student have a grasp of the content, Felicia has the students do an exercise in which they must organize the information from the article into the appropriate column. Students were instructed to write down whether immigrants from the countries mentioned were either attracted to (pulled) America or (pushed) forced to come here due to bad circumstances. I helped the students on either side of me to give them some clarification.

After this exercise, Felicia gave the students a comprehension quiz to check if they understood what the article was about in its entirety. She told the students to only use their notes for the quiz yet I saw many students referencing the article during the quiz despite her instructions. After she collected the papers, Felicia read a chapter of the script of the movie Rain Main aloud to the class. It appears that they do this at the end of each lesson.