Blog 8: Sheltered Lesson

The teacher was focusing on teaching students how to use inferences.  She used the book Esperanza Rising with her students who were obviously not emerging speakers.  She encouraged students to make text to self connections and helped them through making inferences.

What do you see the teacher do?

·         Set objectives,

·         identify vocabulary

·         gives contexts

·         uses some realia

·         provides visual support

·         using students first language

·         previewing the reading

 What do you see the students do?

The students were not particularly engaged during this lesson.  I think they were well behaved and appeared to be listening but definitely not actively engaged in the lesson.  They politely answered questions but it wasn't until the very end of the lesson before they really answered anything authentic or meaningful.

  

List essential components of the sheltered lesson, comment on your observation of both the teacher and student.

• ·         Teacher set clear language and content objectives
• ·         Vocabulary was introduced
• ·         Teacher reviewed concepts and summed up the lesson objectives
• ·         Teacher made real life connections for students

Although the teacher did spend a lot of time introducing and discussing vocabulary, there were really too many vocabulary words.  When she was explaining some of the vocabulary she used the original vocabulary word to define the vocabulary word.  It would have been nice if she had given the students the chance to practice vocabulary using other modalities.

In this video the teacher does most of the talking.  She didn’t really help encourage students to participate other than just by asking questions.  There was no real opportunity for them to interact with each other or practice skills with peers which we know from our readings is ideal for students learning a new language.  Additionally, one student answered all of the questions and the teacher didn’t use a lot of techniques to get other students to participate. 

I feel like the comprehension skills were not really mastered because students never got the opportunity to practice or demonstrate that they understood what they had been taught in the lesson.