Objectives and classrooms

Hi everybody,

Let’s talk a Little bit about the objective.

I think all our classes must have an objective, Here we oblige our teacher to have an everyday lesson plan and objective. When observing classes as coordinators, one of our objective is to check that what the teacher is doing correspond to the objective he or she is obliged to write on the board. This is to ensure a grade of quality to our institute. Students entering the class know what they are going to learn. Moreover, we check that our teacher have a correct wrap up activity at the end of their class to check if their students reached the objective otherwise they will have to remedy the situation by giving their students extra exercises or by repeating the class in order to make their students understand the lesson

Now to talk about what we are learning for the moment in this course, I must say that It first open completely my mind on how to use the web successfully in my classes. I am already thinking about opening different blogs for mu different groups. To be honest here the problem is that I never know which group I am going to teach the next month as we teach a month session. Now after this course and giving training to all our teachers, we could really change our teaching system and make our students much more technologically aware.
Including the internet in part of the grading could be one of the steps even though we already use it with the method we use (Longman-Pearson Topnotch and Summit).

Most of us noticed that our students have many weaknesses but sometimes it is hard to remedy them. Talking about the problems I found here, one of the first step we should take is to change the educational system in our student’s first language.

If you do not oblige your students to read in their first language what do you in a second language. I put my daughter in a private school which is bilingual and where they have to read a book every two month and sometimes every month. Now my daughter who is only 9 years old asks me to buy books because she loves reading. Every night we read a chapter.
Most of my students do not read anything. This could be considered as a school problem but the problem I have with them is that they do not know anything about anything. when we specific topics in our books, nobody is participating or nearly nobody because they do not know about the topic in their own language. Who is talking in the classroom, the TEACHER. This makes our classes different to what we expect. We try to promote much less teacher’s talk and much more students interaction meaning student- student or student teacher interaction but not only teacher- student interaction.

Another consequence of the lack of reading in our students is that when writing they are really poor in ideas as well in vocabulary. Another problem I am dealing with is that students are not accustomed to studying. They start studying a few minutes before the test or only think that what they have heard in the classroom is enough. Wrong!
Most of the students here think that only by being in the classroom is enough to pass. Wrong!
Another problem we are dealing with is that many students just attend classes to get their certificate because it is mandatory in all universities here to have a second language certificate to graduate but the students have no interest in knowing another language. This is sometimes frustrating for someone like me who wants his or her students to learn something

I would like to hear about your student’s interest in your classroom. Do you have the same problem? How do you deal with it.
Now I have also to remind you that I am a foreigner in the country where I live. I am also completely different from the culture I live in. I do not complain, I love where I live but I see some problems that I am not accustomed to and I would like to solve them. No culture is better than another, but sometimes you can try to do something to make it better.

Waiting for you comments

Faithfully yours,

Raphaël




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