Paul C.O. #1

My first class observation was a Composition class taught by Leslie Wagner. She was teaching Group 1 Students. Actually, Marcos (a conversation partner) is in the class! She started off with passing out their graded work from their last class together. She gave them their work with the the errors marked and then had them each work on fixing them to turn back in. One student had no mistakes to fix, but the rest did so they all worked on them. Leslie had me answer a couple of questions from the students at the table I was at. The main issue the happened was S/V agreement and missing articles.

After correcting their errors, she reviewed the simple past tense on the board. Then she had the students work in small groups to write a story. She required a setting, one sentence in the simple present, one sentence in present continuous, and 2 sentences in the simple past. (This is where I got the idea for my last group tutoring session!) 

Leslie had to stop some students from speaking in Arabic a couple times because so many of the students speak it to each other. I noticed that she put one non-Arabic speaker in each group to minimize that problem. The students were so focused on the requirements that they ended up writing sentences back to back without actually creating a story! For example, "Ciao Wei went to the mall. Badar smoked hookah at Sheesha Cafe. They go to school on Wednesdays." 

So, once Leslie noticed that each group was doing that, she had them go back and make an actual story while also fulfilling the other requirements. I could see that the students struggled more with it, but in a good way! It was more challenging for them. 

At the end of class, she collected the stories and corrected assignments from the beginning of class.