Monitoring #3: Choosing an area of focus in my teaching

Quizzing the kids by slowing down my questioning

This short video observation is one I am examining more closely to monitor my questioning of my students.  It comes after 1 hour of learning the concepts and their meanings and thorough discussions around examples of them.  I’ve chosen to highlight this part of my teaching practice, as normally, my default teaching would have shared a document and asked students to write down their answers and share it with me.  For my deliberate teaching, I’ve chosen to use verbal prompts to encourage students the opportunity to verbalise their learning in a comfortable classroom environment.  

Positives: 

• Holding the suspense of students by not rushing the questions.
  
• Not worrying too much about kids who call out things that isn’t the answer.
  
• Being aware that kids may miss out and acknowledge them.
  
• Most of the kids were engaged when I slowed down the quiz
  
• For the boys, I wanted it to be a bit more challenging and so I put a small time challenge on it.  They ended up trying to beat their own times and their friends.
  

Work ons:  

Perhaps have the students lead the words and ask each other the same way.  I can model more.  Not have me talk the whole time.  I said ‘shhh too many times’.  I also say ‘o.k’ and ‘right’ a lot as well.

Observations and next time actions.

When scoping the room, I’m aware that Marco is not looking my way, but he put himself at the front, which was unusual, he is usually hiding at the back.  I have noticed that he wanted to take part in the group challenges so for next time, I will encourage and invite some group challenges.  

I am also aware that girls at the back like Ana had her hand up and that I ensure that they aren’t ignored by attention being on the boys.  I might give them a different challenge because they are high ability students.

What I learnt about myself doing this:

I would normally rush tasks and when I have asked questions in the past, I would usually have asked students I know would answer the question.  This time, I purposely used wait time a little bit more and dragged out the questions because I wanted kids to think about the question and if they were picked, they could be ready.  I think this helped build their confidence more and kept them a bit more engaged for the next question.  

I enjoyed this process and even though it may have seemed like we didn’t get much done, or any writing or reading, I felt happy with the outcomes.