Today I observed Xueling’s class in Academic Writing. The students are all intermediate learners from non-English countries, and most of them are from China. The teacher taught students by sharing her screen with students and offering them teaching material by employing PowerPoint. I think that the teacher has indeed grasped a strong foundation of English ability for teaching students. However, there are more challenges for her to teach smoothly. As far as I know, Xueling is Chinese. I believe that she is super teacher-centered under the influence of cultural background. In the process of teaching, there were some problems I noticed. First of all, the teacher asked students to read a paragraph to understand what a summary is and nominate a student to give a brief explanation for that. That student hesitated to say something, and other students do not have any responses as well. Secondly, Martin, an active student, asked a thing irrelated to class twice, but he got shut down and ignored by the teacher as she thought Martin was interrupting the class going normally. Another thing is that she did not create a warm and friendly learning environment for students. She did not even turn on the camera. Most students did not want to speak out, and they preferred typing into the chatbot. She did not realize and encouraged, instead, too much break in the class, which affected class progress and atmosphere profoundly. What’s more, she should not show her unprofessional in class. For example, she did not know how to pronounce a person’s name she gave in an example. Also, she gave cumbersome instructions to get students confused for group work. Overall, I will regard this observation as my lesson to warn me to stop being teacher-centered, adjusting teaching methods to cater to students’ needs, and being professional to create a warm, fun, and well-managed classroom.
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