Practice: Teacher talk- student talk

Practice: Teacher talk- student talk

History in English, 5th and 6th grade

Today I attended a history lesson on my practice for the first time. It was something new compering  to the lessons I've seen before for few main reasons.

Firstly, maths and history are very different from one another, not only because of the specific of the subject but also the ways of teaching. If students need to understand, remember and use a mathematic formula they need to be taught in the most efficient way, certainly not the same as if they were to remember dates and names and understand causes and effects of historical events. That's why I decided to write about the importance of teacher talk- student talk. I'll describe how it looks like on a maths and history lesson.

How do they talk on mats

On those lessons, after teacher presents the task, conversation between her and students happens occasionally. These are questions from the students or teacher trying to calm the class down as they misbehave. When it comes to questions, students usually raises their hands, teacher comes over and answers. If the same problem appears few times teacher sometimes decides to speak in the lockstep. It happened few times that teacher didn't give the answer straight away but tried to put the student on the right track. The second type of conversation happens very often. In my opinion it is hardly a conversation. My impression is that there are repetitive scheme of those situations. Students are loud and don't listen to the teacher. Later the teacher shouts and uses different methods to calm the class down, like shouting, counting to ten (if the class don't calm down until number ten teacher gives them a small test) or trying to intimidate the naughtiest student.

I mainly observed lessons with individual work so students wasn't supposed to talk to each other, but they were. Maybe that's why the communication looked like this. When it comes to using English it's different for the teacher and for the students. Teacher tries to talk in English, but it's more or less 40% of the time. She says repetitive commands in English but in new topic or new situation (spontaneous one) she sticks to Polish, so that everyone understands her. Students speak very differently. There are some who speak only in Polish even if the teacher insists on English, there are some trying to use English but mainly Polish, two students talk in English almost all the time and more than the teacher, and finally there are some not talking at all. I think it's impossible to tell which is better and it's hard to say what the teacher should do differently to make her lessons more efficient when it comes to talking in English. But she for sure could encourage her students more, mostly the insecure ones.

How do they talk on history

History lessons have different structure than maths lessons. It looks more like a discussion session. There are moment of teacher's talk, teacher asking questions to the group, teacher asking question to a specific student or general class conversation. As you can see, the lesson is verified when it comes to kinds of activities. I guess that's why the students are mainly calm and don't misbehave that much. This is for certain an advantage of the history lessons, students are exposed to different activeness. They rarely have time to be distracted.

Teacher talk is also very well conducted. The teacher uses projector to show photos, short clips or schemas which enables the students to visualize the topic of the lesson. While talking to students the teacher asks questions related to their experiences, school life or the topic they talked about before. This makes most of the students active and willing to take part in the lesson.

I didn't see pair work or group work in the class, I think this is the missing element of the lesson. Nevertheless, I really enjoy observing the teacher and students exploring topics one by one together.