Kennell_CO_#1

Classroom Observation #1 (1/13/2014)

On Tuesday, I sat in on Ryan Flemming’s grammar class. The class started with two minutes of finding mistakes in sentences that Ryan put up on the projector. Students were then asked to talk to each other, comparing their mornings. They were to focus on using we, I, and He/She sentences. The class then talked about “will” statements and other predictions. The last activity of the day consisted of the students writing predictions down on scraps of paper. The scraps were then read aloud, and the students tried to guess who had written the predictions. It was a fun end to a good class.

I found Ryan’s approach to teaching his class very interesting. He very much exemplified the “coach over sage” school of thought when working with his students. I was struck by how the class was much more conversational than lecture-driven. A moment that stuck out in my mind was Ryan discussing the pronunciation of the phrase “talked with.” He had to explain that, when sped up, it sounded more like “talk twith.” It was a very interesting way to empathetically approach pronunciation problems, and I hope to use similar methods one day.