Action Research Diary Notes
How can I foster a classroom environment that encourages meaningful interactions and cooperative learning in an English language classroom?
Observations
Through my observations I was able to witness the styles of different teachers, student and full-time teachers, so through those observations I was able to see how each of them looks at and deals with classroom participation and the interactions between their students. I found it interesting how each teacher dealt with their different age groups and the methods which each of them employed. Here are some of the most memorable moments from these lessons in regards to student participation. When talking about “participation”, I am referring to the general student participation in the lesson, which includes vocal participation (in the form of answering questions), group and pair work (are the students interacting among themselves about the lesson?) as well as individual work (personalised writing or answering of questions)..
Example 1 - One of the first situations that I had witnessed (grade 4) was during another teacher’s pair activity. The students all got into their own pairs and their task was to come up with an action to represent a verb. It was to show that they understand what verbs are and are able to represent them in their own ways. It was a great interactive activity which most of the students enjoyed taking part in, they came up with a lot of different actions and had a lot of fun doing it. While a lot of them used Polish when talking with each other, the fact that they were taking part in the activity showed that they were still participating in the lesson. One specific pair caught my eye, it was two students who both seemed to be generally quiet and had been paired up as a last pair when everyone else had already grouped up. I had seen them in the other activities and both were quiet overall in the whole class. They weren’t too keen on working together either, it seemed like they hadn’t known each other very well. The teacher, however, helped them out with a prompt on which they tentatively worked together and presented to the classroom when their turn came up. This observation made me realise that the role of the teacher in that situation was to encourage them to work together and help guide them. They were involved in the lesson and knew what they had to do, it just wasn’t something they seemed to be interested in doing.
Example 2 - Another example of participation that I had witnessed was in a grade 1 class. The teacher had come up with an active activity where the learners had to race to one end of a room in order to get a word, bring it back to their group and match it with the correct vocabulary picture. In this activity, the learners were working in 3 larger groups and had to work together to quickly retrieve an item while competing against the other teams. The competitive aspect of the activity seemed to be of great interest to the majority of the students as everyone was excitedly calling out to each other while taking part in the activity. While it is likely that there were some students who didn’t enjoy the competition, everyone was taking part and participating. While there was a downside in that the vocabulary seemed to be ignored at times (the students forgot to match the picture to word between rounds), they were all engaged in the lesson activity nevertheless (especially since the matching was, in the end, completed). This is a positive example of group work enforcing and showing participation between the students. However, I am unsure if everyone enjoyed this kind of game or if they were only participating because of the pressure from classmates to “win” the game. To find this out, I would ask for opinions on this kind of activity (happy/sad).
Following these observations, I got the chance to teach my own lessons within which I began noticing different things that would lead to this research project and the questions asked here. Here are some examples of things that happened in my lessons and how they inspired my question and the changes which I applied in class with hopes of improvements.
My lessons
Example 1 - The first glaring issue that I had witnessed was within a grade 5 class, these learners were already at a pretty high level where a lot of them were talking a lot in the lesson which was amazing to see in a class of ESL learners. It definitely made the lesson a lot easier to lead, however I quickly encountered a problem in that only half of the class was engaging in the lesson by answering questions posed to the whole class. I found that when asking for raised hands, it was always the same few students who did so, or called out loud. I struggled to engage the quieter students in these activities. It was due to this situation that my original question of “How to encourage students to talk more in the lessons?” was formed.
One of the first and immediate changes that I did was in the second part of this lesson, directly after the first one was introducing pair work, while this wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision, as it was in my original lesson plan, the variety of different activities proved to be pretty successful.
I have noticed, however, that most, if not all of the students, were engaging in the activity which required them to speak together in pairs, in this activity each student had to pretend that they had a job (volcano explorer or a forest firefighter) and had to tell the other one about the work that they do. Based on my monitoring, the activity was successful as all of the students talked among each other, some used much more basic descriptions while others explained more of their roles. They had lists of each category up on the board to use as a crutch. I did notice that when I approached some of the students they would immediately stop talking among each other until I left which could show that the reason they may choose not to talk out loud in class was possibly because of the fear of being judged by me as the teacher or by their peers.
However, I am unsure if the reason for this success was the fact that they got to work in pairs and so were open to conversation, or if the activity was too simple due to the activity answers all being written up on the whiteboard (from the previous activity during which not everyone partook). This is something I will work on in later lessons to see how effective it really is.
Something that I will do in order to improve the engagement in my classroom will branch off of that second lesson during which I tested the use of pair work in getting the students to engage in the topic. It is something that I think is important to do multiple times and to find out their opinions on this type of classroom work. Therefore, in the next lessons I will apply more group and pair work to see the differences between those and individual work.
Example 2 - Another situation that I had encountered that proved to be an issue was that in whole group activities, the younger students struggled to engage in student-student talk, while this very likely depends on the type of activity, I have found that in the majority of activities with this as its basis the students struggled to stay interested in the topic and would often go off topic when not being in the direct focus. This however, I believe to be my fault as it was in a much more controlled environment with very little personalisation. An example of this activity would be practising the question and answer form of the topic “What are you wearing?” “I am wearing a ______.” The students who answered were then expected to ask another student the same question. However, I agree that this wasn’t structured in the best way and in order to improve this I will try different types of activities with this as its format. I had done this activity with the students sitting on the carpet, asking the question to the next person over. Next time I will, instead, bring an item (maybe a bean bag or soft ball) for them to throw to each other to ask the specific questions, and to limit them throwing to their friends, they will be required to throw it based on boy-girl-boy-girl. Alternatively, I’ll separate them into smaller groups and have them ask each other the questions in that fashion.
A while later, I applied similar techniques to another situation. I had come to the conclusion that in general, pair work has been a lot more successful than large group work; however, I did want to try the whole class activity one more time. I brought in a small soft ball (which I described above) and conducted a similar activity using it. While it was a bit more successful than the previous time, there were still a few downsides to this method as the students were still getting bored and uninterested in the activity. There was a lot more classroom management in this situation as students were getting upset that the ball was not being thrown to them even emphasising the boy-girl-boy pattern.
In that same lesson, I did pair work straight after to see how the students would work. They did seem to be a lot more focused than in the whole group and most students were on task. However it was necessary to move on from the activity quickly as the students would go off topic really fast after this. It was successful to an extent, but I would have to come up with more engaging activities later on.
Example 3 - Another example that I can talk about in relation to this topic can be seen during my first CLIL lesson in which the different stages of the lesson were organised differently. The first half of the lesson, during which I was presenting the new information (in this case, showing how to play the four unique games), was done in a whole group situation. I found that this became a lot more unorganised and chaotic really quickly, it was a lot harder to manage everyone in the classroom wanting to engage with the game (it was great that they all wanted to participate, but it made it a lot harder to present the activity). Also, when the learners all sit on the floor with an activity to work on, it is often a lot more distracting for them as they often sit with their friends and are more able to talk to them.
There was, however, a stark difference from the next half of the activities where the learners got into four smaller groups to play the different games presented. First of all, I gave them the instructions, in different orders to figure out both - their teams and the instructions for the games. These can be seen in the attached image. One thing I underestimated was the speed at which they could organise the puzzle pieces together. I had colour coded them, thinking that it would be too difficult without it but they ended up doing it much faster. Once they got to their tables, I walked around and asked them if they could explain the rules to me. Most of them were able to explain it in Polish but when I told them that I didn’t understand, they worked together to try to explain it to me. They worked really well at that moment and it was a lot calmer of a situation than before. They then were able to enjoy and play the games together.
During one of the games, I was actually a little surprised that the learners preferred to play the game in a 2v2 situation rather than the 1v1v1v1 that I had expected (as the game allowed them all to play separately). They seemed to be able to organise themselves well and worked and played together perfectly. When I asked them why they weren't all playing, they explained it really well to me, which I was happy to see. There were some small issues and downsides, such as some students not wanting to play a certain game, however they were resolved without any extra problems.
Student opinions - During one of my lessons, I gave my students a mini chart to fill out. I asked them what type of lesson activities they preferred. They were to tick a box next to one of the images to answer the question “What type of activity do you like?”
Here are the results:
Pair work: 9
Group work: 3
Individual work: 4
Based on these results, I have gathered that the majority of students prefer to do pair work while bigger group work is liked the least.
I would assume that pair work is enjoyable because it allows students to work with a friend, they are able to help each other and, most importantly for them, they are able to chat together in their L1.
When it comes to group work, the likelihood as to why they are not favoured is because they can cause a lot of arguments and students often want to sit only with their friends.
Individual work is also somewhat popular because students can focus on their own work and are not dependent on other students.
In conclusion to this, I believe that pair work can be the most effective means of building activities.
Mentor teacher opinions - I discussed my research question with my mentor teacher to get her opinion on it, as well as getting a better understanding of her input and understanding of her classroom as it is a space and students whom she is a lot more familiar with
The main difference that I had gathered from our conversation is our understanding of the students, their personalities and how they act outside of the classroom situation. She mentioned that a lot of the “quiet” students are very talkative and animated outside of the lessons when talking about subjects of interest and outside of the lesson situation. They don't seem to have an issue in a low stress and low pressure environment. This corroborates well with my ideas and findings in that within these group work based activities, the students will be able to interact with each other more freely with less worry and stress placed on them, something that my mentor teacher also agrees upon.
The other points of discussion that we shared all seemed to point in the same direction as my research had taken me. The only large issue is effective classroom and behaviour management as with these kinds of lesson activities, it is bound to be much louder and a lot easier for students to go off topic and lose focus in the activities. Meaning that effective management as well as engaging activities are key for these types of lessons to work effectively.
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