Allison CO - 3

Yesterday I went to Karin's Group 1 listening class to observe. She was quite happy to have me there and the students seemed to enjoy my presence too. The atmosphere was quite relaxed and friendly. She is very active and her energy is quite contagious! She began with a quick role call and wrote the itinerary on the whiteboard. Then she had me introduce myself to the class.

Keeping a fast pace throughout the entire lesson, Karin quickly segwayed into the next activity. She split everyone into pairs from different countries to discuss whether we thought old people or young people were happier. My partner was from some Middle Eastern country and he said that the youth of his country is definitely a lot happier than the elderly. I said that in America it depends on if people saved up some money for retirement if they would be happier at an old age. I also said that the youth seem pretty happy too. I stood at the fence and said both for American happiness. Next we listened to a recording about a gallop survey done about which age group was the happiest.

During the middle of class, one student was dismissed abruptly. I am not sure why as I was writing something down at the time. Perhaps he was texting? Whatever he was doing was not making any noise because I was sitting just one seat away so I would have heard something.

After the listening task, she had the students break into two teams. This really gets the students to participate even more than they were before. The students were instructed to write down the main ideas of the recording on the board in an organized fashion. Karin went over the work on the board and emphasized categorizing information in a clear manner so as to be able to quickly summarize what they had just heard.

Next, she handed out a fill in the blank worksheet and had the students listen to the same recording again. She did this to have them listen for details. All of her error correction is done orally and when she does correct the errors, she does not fix ALL of them. I think she does this so as to not overwhelm the students. She provides constructive feedback both on the worksheets as well as the information that the two teams wrote about on the board.